100 DAYS OF ATTITUDE

By JOHN F. STACKS PHOTOGRAPHS FOR TIME BY P.F. BENTLEY

SOMETIME THIS THURSDAY, 435 members of Congress will stagger off the floor of the House of Representatives. Their eyes may be red-rimmed, their tempers frayed, their minds exhausted and their family relationships strained. Some, like Representative Pete Geren of Texas, will have celebrated their kids' birthdays over breakfast because they haven't been home for dinner in almost 100 days.

But for all the fatigue, most of them, especially the 230 Republican members, will feel as though they have been part of an important historical moment. They will leave Washington with visions of big black check marks placed proudly beside a list of 10 items that constitute the so-called "Contract with America." They will say they are proud to have been a part of the most productive legislative blitz since the borning days of the New Deal. And if their leader Newt Gingrich has his way, a parade of elephants borrowed from Ringling Bros. will circle the Capitol to demonstrate G.O.P. dominance.

While the Gingrich Congress has yet to put much final law on the statute books, the simple change of control in the House has brought a useful, fresh breeze to Washington, ending the baronial control Democratic committee chairmen exercised that frustrated even their President. Some limits to the revolution have already become clear: the combination of Senate delay engineered masterfully by the Democrats, a more moderate stripe to many of the Republicans in the upper chamber, and the potential for presidential vetoes. Yet the mere act of getting all but one of the contract's provisions through the House, ranging from the balanced-budget amendment to anticrime measures, dispelled to some extent the notion that nothing ever gets done in Washington. "It's very healthy for the democratic system that we had an explicit set of promises made before an election, followed by a serious and largely successful effort to deliver on those promises," says Brookings Institution congressional scholar Thomas Mann. "At one level, it is democratic accountability at its best."

While the failure of the balanced-budget amendment was the work of the Senate, and mostly of its Democrats, the House revolutionaries failed to deliver the constitutional amendment limiting the terms of its own members. The vote was an early test--and one the House leadership failed--of whether they could get their members to vote against their personal interests. This week will provide another test of political wisdom when the House votes the last item of the contract, the promised middle-class tax cut. A very tough fight is in store over the size of the total reductions, over whether there should be any revenue cuts before serious spending cuts are enacted and finally, over which citizens should get any tax cuts that are enacted.

Indeed, before the G.O.P. House members start imagining how history will treat their sprint through the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, they had better get some rest. For it will be the next 100 days and the 100 after those that will determine the real measure of their success at turning America toward a new course. "We are going to get to a balanced budget in seven years," Gingrich told TIME last week. "It will be so large, so comprehensive and so daring that I don't think anybody is going to say this is business as usual. We are going to eliminate several government departments. This is a scale of change nobody has seen since 1933." The coming decisions and the votes will be a good deal more perilous than those of the first 100 days. The next 100 will require courage and huge political risk if the G.O.P. Representatives are to accomplish the goal they have set: the restoration of fiscal sanity and efficient government.

As they start offending their core constituencies, the Republicans will have to endure a challenge to their popularity as well. The President is already catching up with them. When citizens were asked in a TIME/CNN poll last week whom they trusted more to deal with the major issues facing the country, President Clinton was preferred by 42% of those surveyed, vs. 41% for the congressional Republicans. Clinton is up 12 points since early December, while the G.O.P. is down five points during the same period. Partly because of his abrasive style and partly because of Democratic characterizations of the contract as unfair to the poor, poll ratings for Gingrich have become more negative. Some 47% of those polled disapproved of his handling of his job as Speaker, while 40% approved. Just a month ago, his negative rating in this category was seven points lower.

His chief lieutenant, majority leader Dick Armey from Texas, is predicting ultimate success. Armey says 65% of the contract will be passed by the Republican Senate, and half will be signed into law. "None of us ever overpromised," he says.

The contract began as a very political campaign document, carefully poll- and focus-group tested for its popularity. But as a legislative strategy, it proved even more useful in presenting a list of very popular and easily passable propositions. "It is fair to say," Gingrich said last week, "that we cleverly picked popular things to do." Passing the contract provided a large degree of political momentum. But it didn't provide many profiles in courage.

The most daring legislation so far was the welfare-reform bill enacted two weeks ago. While the measure did not alter by much the total spending targeted for helping the nation's poor, it took the historic step of eliminating many of the federal welfare programs from the sacred category of entitlements. That was done by fixing limits on what will be spent rather than letting the programs require whatever funds a recipient had coming under federal rules. The implication is that if poverty increases, some recipients will simply be out of luck unless state and local governments pick up the tab.

"Workfare, not welfare" has been a campaign battle cry for years, but until the contract, nothing much happened on the federal level. The House voted to force welfare recipients into jobs after two years of being on the dole. But in its zeal to cut federal spending, no money for jobs or job training was provided. A study released two weeks ago by the Congressional Budget Office predicts that no state in the union will be able to fulfill the work requirements in the bill.

Nonetheless, the country is up in arms over welfare, convinced that while the middle class is struggling, the poor are getting something for nothing. The debate in the House on welfare was symptomatic of that anger. Representative John Mica of Florida's Seventh District compared welfare recipients to alligators and cautioned that "unnatural feeding and artificial care increases dependency." His fellow Republican, Representative Barbara Cubin of Wyoming, decided that the better analogy was to caged wolves: "When you take away their freedom and their dignity, they can't provide for themselves." In opposition, Representative Earl Hilliard, a Democrat from Alabama, concluded starkly that the proposed welfare cuts were "un-American."

While the net savings from welfare reform are relatively small in the short term and unknowable in the long run, the more direct assaults on budgetary excess fell well short of a revolution. The vaunted balanced-budget amendment failed by one vote in the Senate. Many Democrats saw the amendment as a mere gimmick to push into the future the tough decisions that will move federal spending toward balance. Lamenting the failure of the amendment and thus of the legal force he hoped would help push the Congress toward budget sanity, Massachusetts Governor William Weld called the failure "devastating to the Republican budget plan. Many of the members need an institutional reason to be for a balanced budget."

While the budget amendment failed, the line-item veto passed and will be signed by President Clinton. Every President since Ulysses S. Grant has asked for this authority to pare outrageous pork out of the spending bills. And certainly giving the President the power to stop Congress before it spends again could be marginally helpful to containing deficits. But the line-item veto authority will apply to small accounts in a big budget. It will also invite the Congress to vote special-interest projects and then let the President take the political heat for killing them. Predicts former New Jersey state treasurer Richard C. Leone, whose state's Governor has long had the line-item veto: "It will give the folks in Washington a way to pretend they are making progress without really doing anything."

If these efforts at cutting spending were less than revolutionary, actual cuts in the current budget offered even less. Moreover, they hurt no core Republican constituency. Their recisions of $17.3 billion on the current-year budget served Republican interests, penalized Democratic groups and hacked at Clinton's programs. And all the while, members of the appropriations committee were busy protecting their home bases. Committee chairman Robert Livingston spared more than $38 million in projects for his home state of Louisiana, the biggest of which (as first reported by Newsday) was $15 million for a new bioenvironmental research building at his alma mater, Tulane University.

Even the leadership was appalled. In an interview with TIME, Republican Conference chairman John Boehner of Ohio called the recision bill an "eye-opener in terms of how it was put together." He criticized the secrecy of the committee-"what was cut, some of the things that weren't cut, the fact that it was done kind of quietly and nobody could see it. Many of us believe this process ought to be open to a little bit of sunlight."

Now comes the really hard part: reducing the endless entitlement machine that spins public money into private hands at a breathtaking and bankrupting rate, and doing all this fairly across political and economic divides. If they actually do this, some Representatives are likely to lose their jobs in 1996. Says Gary Johnson, the new Republican Governor of New Mexico and a strong contract enthusiast: "The whole syndrome still seems to be, 'Everything else is okay to cut, but not mine.' Let them understand that they may not all get re-elected, but do it. Just do it." Advises Democrat Martin Chavez, mayor of Albuquerque: "They have got to spread the hurt around more."

The first look at how the hurt might be spread comes next month when House Budget Committee chairman John Kasich unveils the G.O.P. budget. More than Newt Gingrich, maybe more than anyone alive, Kasich is a budget cutter to his core. He believes in less government and seems willing to make that happen by cutting spending-really cutting spending. The presence of Kasich ( "a stone-cold killer on the budget," Governor Weld calls him fondly) will mean that no one, Republican or Democrat, will be able to duck, assuming the House leadership gives Kasich his head.

Kasich has been adamant about going after welfare for the rich with as much enthusiasm as his party showed for cutting welfare for the poor. Some Budget Committee members have been touting a list drawn up by the libertarian Cato Institute that targets 125 areas where corporations enjoy largesse from Washington worth $85 billion, ranging from $17 billion for agricultural industries to $13 billion for defense companies. Such reductions would force the loyal G.O.P. freshmen to start voting against their core constituencies for the first time.

As the battle moves on to who gets what and who pays what, the billings from corporate lobbyists and industry associations will soar. And the evidence so far in this Congress is that these lobbyists know the game better than the members who are doing the voting. During the debate on the G.O.P. plan to limit plaintiff damage suits against business, former Reagan legislative aide Alan Kranowitz, now a lobbyist for the National Association of Wholesaler-Distributors, sat in an office in the Capitol, coordinating the lobbying of specific members whose votes were in doubt. Sniffed an aide to a Democratic House member: "The Republicans have no idea what they are doing. Lobbyists are running the place." Of course, labor and environmental and other so-called public-interest lobbyists were not exactly out of the loop for the 40 years the Democrats ran the House.

Sometime this summer, the G.O.P. leadership will permit the debate to begin on even more divisive social issues, like abortion and gun control. The firebrands on these issues were convinced, although just barely, that in the interests of the contract, discussion of these matters should be left for later in the session. But Gingrich can't delay these arguments forever. Thus cohesion of the G.O.P. coalition will be even more sorely tested.

Gingrich, as usual, is preparing for this new test. Two weeks ago, he began calling small groups of Republican House members and their staffs to a conference room in his Capitol suite of offices. There he has delivered two-hour-long inspirational lectures. "We are different from other politicians," he has told them. "We are keeping our commitments." But he tells them that what they have done is not enough.

"Balancing the budget is too small and too narrow a vision," he exhorts in a 134-page outline titled The House Republican Plan for a Better America. "We have a new opportunity to renew America by setting new goals and achieving them by transforming our approach to to government." Conscious of the pounding he has taken from the Democrats, Gingrich has been especially adamant about getting his troops singing the same rhetorical song. "I call upon members to spend the April break explaining the House G.O.P. plans to their constituents and to report back to Washington for a two-day retreat in May to plan the program and how they will sell it." The general is ready for the next battle.

This week the finale for the contract will be to enact tax cuts in the face of a nearly impossible task of cutting enough spending to balance the budget. The question, as always, will come down to "how much and for whom." The leadership bill sets an upper limit of $200,000 a year in annual family income. But even some Republicans fear that giving tax breaks to the wealthy after having restricted welfare entitlements will give the Democrats a stick with which to beat them. Or a slogan. Democrats have begun sporting buttons that read pick on someone your own size. "That's pretty good politics," says Lawton Chiles, Florida's Democratic Governor. "The Democrats finally found something they can stand on." As a result, Gingrich has received a petition signed by 106 members to cap the tax break at $95,000.

The last time Republicans set the agenda, Ronald Reagan was President and David Stockman was his Budget Director. Stockman believed they could cut government down to size fairly if they went after "weak claims, not just weak clients." Instead they lowered taxes and increased spending and sent the deficit spinning out of control. It's hard to believe the Republicans will make the same mistake twice. But tomorrow is another 100 days.

--Reported by James Carney and Karen Tumulty/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Santa Fe

With reporting by JAMES CARNEY AND KAREN TUMULTY/WASHINGTON AND RICHARD WOODBURY/SANTA FE