NEWT'S NIGHTMARE

By JAMES CARNEY;KAREN TUMULTY

As he stood before a group of senior citizens in Des Moines, Iowa, recently, Richard Gephardt was reminded that their cheers were at best a halfhearted embrace. The House Democratic leader had come to Iowa to stump for congressional candidates and to rail against Newt Gingrich for attempting to slash Medicare spending. The Republicans had so bungled their mandate and had pushed such an extreme agenda, Gephardt said, that Democrats should be given another chance. Which made sense to Arlyn Hodson. "We'll see you in the Speaker's seat!" the 66-year-old retired postal worker and Air Force veteran shouted to Gephardt. "Anyone's better than the nut they got in there now!"

That's hardly a ringing endorsement, and as such, it sums up Gephardt's challenge if he has any chance of replacing Gingrich as Speaker: before the nation is willing to oust the Republicans, it will have to decide whether it can trust the Democrats again. So it falls to Gephardt to make the country believe two years in the wilderness have been enough, that his is a chastened party with the discipline to keep its liberal, profligate instincts in check. "We got the message," Gephardt insists. "If you can't learn from your mistakes, then you aren't worth much."

Those words come from a man with a knack for adjusting his philosophy to fit the political circumstances of the moment. From the time he was elected student-body president at Northwestern University in 1961, on the highly pliable platform of "creative long-term leadership," Gephardt's ideology of choice has been pragmatism. Starting out as an antiabortion moderate who knocked off a union-backed incumbent to win his House seat in 1976, Gephardt evolved into a pro-choice liberal whom labor considers its most reliable friend in Congress. Not even his admirers are sure they know what it is Gephardt really believes. But in a 25-year career, he has miscalculated only once, when he ran for President in 1988 and his campaign fizzled after the New Hampshire primary. If he can succeed now in restoring his party's hold over the institution that it once considered its birthright, Gephardt may even get a second chance at that dream.

First he must overcome what polls show is a decided ambivalence on the part of Americans over restoring Democrats to power in the House. While Bill Clinton's double-digit lead over Bob Dole has remained relatively steady for months, polls indicating how Americans plan to vote in their local congressional races are in constant flux, with projections ranging from a narrow G.O.P. advantage to a 12-point Democratic blowout. Gephardt believes that if the Democrats can carry a lead half that size into November, they will gain the 20 seats they need to capture the majority. And the chances of that happening, say political analysts like Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, are as high as fifty-fifty. Republicans are already sounding the alarms, portraying Gephardt and his "radical roster" of paleoliberal committee chairmen in the grimmest terms. "We're the only thing that stands between Clinton and devastation," says California Congressman David Dreier.

Unlike the man he would replace, no one would ever mistake Gephardt for a revolutionary. With his flat Midwestern accent, his crisp, cuffless blue suits and his wispy, ginger-colored hair, he comes across as exactly what he is: careful and deliberate, encouraging but rarely inspiring. Where Gingrich prefers to back his opponents up against a wall, Gephardt would rather subdue them at the negotiating table. His willingness to sit and listen for hours while others gripe and posture has earned him the nickname "Ironbutt," courtesy of his colleagues.

And yet Gephardt is not above borrowing the tactics of the enemy, especially when he has seen them work. For the first time, congressional Democrats have spelled out what they intend to do if voters give them a second chance, an imitation of the strategy they ridiculed, to their regret, when the Republicans ran on the Contract with America two years ago. Gone are any grand liberal schemes for redistributing wealth and re-engineering society. In their place is Families First, an agenda Gephardt calls "modest, realistic and achievable," and Republicans blast as election-year gorilla dust. The greatest testament to the House Democrats' new, centrist course is its embrace of the G.O.P. goal of balancing the budget by 2002--something many House Democrats continue to consider an unnecessary and thankless pursuit.

None of that would have happened had not 40 years of tradition come crashing down the night of Nov. 8, 1994. Gephardt sat up until 3 a.m. in his south St. Louis district, watching in shocked silence as the election returns came in. Thirty-four Democrats, including then Speaker Tom Foley, were swept out that night. Gone too were about half the Democratic freshmen who had been elected on the moderate themes of Clinton's 1992 campaign. Not one incumbent Republican lost.

Twice before, in the ethics scandals that had toppled first a Speaker and then his majority whip, the fall of others had lifted Gephardt closer to the top of an institution that he had once seen only as a springboard to the White House. With Foley's demise, Gephardt became the highest-ranking Democrat to survive the G.O.P. onslaught. Now he had far more than his own image to retool. "This was destined to happen," Gephardt told his distraught staff the next morning. "We just have to get to work."

Initially, the once haughty Democrats were relegated to bit parts in the first-100-days extravaganza that opened Gingrich's Congress. But their shared humiliation also offered a chance to find the sort of cohesiveness that they had often marveled at in the Republicans. Early on, Gephardt fashioned the test that would force them to confront all their old ideological demons: a Democratic alternative to the G.O.P. welfare-reform bill. Day after day, they argued in Gephardt's office. Hispanic members threatened to walk out over provisions cutting off benefits to legal immigrants; liberals hated the idea of putting time limits on welfare benefits; conservatives wanted to throw out the federal guarantee of benefits entirely. They all lost. But when it was over, only one Democrat voted against the alternative bill. "Everybody came away dissatisfied," Gephardt boasts. "But everybody felt a compulsion to act together."

It is hard to say whether the Democrats will be so open to compromise if they are again given a chance to write legislation that actually has a chance of becoming law. When a similar bill came before the House this summer, liberals bolted. But the early exercise on welfare became the model Gephardt used to produce a plan for a new Democratic majority. As Gingrich and the Republicans began to stumble on issues like school lunches and Medicare, Gephardt and his increasingly optimistic troops began hammering out Families First in endless meetings. "Everyone brought their ideas," he says. Most of them were thrown out, including Gephardt's own pet protectionist proposals on trade.

However modest Gephardt's agenda may be, Republicans point out, it would fall to his committee chairmen to carry it out. Almost to a man (and they are all men), those in line to take the jobs represent the most liberal, activist core of the Democratic membership. But they too say they got the message of the 1994 elections. "The goal is not just to have a program but to accomplish the goals that a program is supposed to achieve," says California's Henry Waxman, whose seniority would give him a choice of several committee or subcommittee posts. "The Democratic chairmen were just too wedded to their programs." It is a remarkable statement from a lawmaker who, as chairman of the health subcommittee, single-mindedly drove Medicaid's explosive growth, surreptitiously slipping expensive new benefits into massive deficit-reduction bills if he had to.

The question is whether voters should believe the records or the new, austere rhetoric of the would-be chairmen. "They are trying to find a way to win the election, and then they will move back and do their agenda," warns Ohio's John Boehner. Even now, some are chafing, making it clear that they see Gephardt's Families First outline as a starting point, not a goal. "Gephardt never has and never would tell me what to do in my committee," Michigan's John Conyers, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told the Wall Street Journal last month.

Recent years have seen changes in Democratic caucus rules that make it easier for the leader to rein in headstrong chairmen. With the credibility of his agenda on the line, Gephardt has hinted he is likely to use that power in a Gingrichian way: by becoming the first Democratic Speaker in more than 20 years to set aside seniority in selecting his chairmen. If the Democrats win back the House, the erratic Henry B. Gonzalez of Texas appears almost certain to be unseated as head of the Banking Committee, and Conyers' position at Judiciary is far from secure.

Gephardt also has sought to diffuse power by spreading it around. As many as 50 Democrats meet daily with him to plan both strategy and policy, and he has put some of the caucus' most conservative members in critical positions. Only weeks after the election, he recruited Texan Chet Edwards to take charge of part of his vote-counting operation; Edwards himself would later vote for three-quarters of Gingrich's Contract with America. And when it came to developing anticrime policy for the caucus, Gephardt turned not to Conyers but to Bart Stupak of Michigan, an ardent foe of gun control.

Political reality will be the strongest force keeping the Democrats from moving too far left. The midterm elections of a President's second term usually hand a big loss to the President's party. But in addition to this cautionary precedent, the Democrats know that if they do regain power, it will be by a margin so thin that they won't pass anything without the support of their moderates--and probably a few Republicans. "We're going to have to run the place the way Sam Rayburn ran it," says Michigan's John Dingell, one of the few House members who have been around long enough to have served under the legendary autocratic Speaker. "Rayburn thought that having too many Democrats was a source of danger and mischief." And while New York's Charles Rangel still has trouble even remembering the name of what he refers to as "the Family whatever-you-call-it program," he can also count votes. "I'm afraid that's what the job is all about," he says. "Nobody would elect me for the Rangel agenda."

As Speaker in a second Clinton term, Gephardt would have to find common ground with the Democrats in the White House too, and that may be complicated by the Missourian's strained relationship with the President. Gephardt is a straight arrow who looks like he walked out of an episode of Happy Days and is said to disapprove of the President's baby-boomer propensity for self-indulgence. On a political level, Gephardt also resents Clinton for his "triangulation" strategy of distancing himself from congressional Democrats. To this day, Hill Democrats argue that Clinton owes his political resurrection not to adviser Dick Morris, who urged the President to co-opt G.O.P. issues, but to Gephardt, who persuaded the White House to attack the Republicans for slashing Medicare.

More of a problem for Gephardt could be the Vice President, Al Gore, the man Gephardt will have to beat in the Democratic primaries if he runs for President in 2000. The two men have a bitter rivalry dating at least as far back as the 1988 presidential primaries, when they assaulted each other with insults and negative ads. If Clinton wins, all Democratic politics will again revert to presidential politics: every move Gephardt makes will be judged in the White House for its impact on Gore, while Gephardt will have to worry constantly about being steamrollered by the White House on Gore's behalf.

But no matter which party wins the House, the arithmetic of a narrow majority seems certain to vest the balance of power in the center. The more important the legislation, the more it will require bipartisan support. Tempered by the public's wrathful reaction to their record in 1995, Gingrich's troops have lately been compromising to get bills passed and signed by the President. In August, that strategy produced laws reforming welfare, making health care portable from job to job and increasing the minimum wage. And just last week Republicans agreed to meet Clinton's demand that they restore the $2.3 billion they had earlier cut from education spending. If what people are asking is not to tear down the House but to make it perform, it may not make a huge difference whether Gingrich or Gephardt is Speaker in January. Either way, the winners of this election may be the voters.

--With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington