GOP IS BRACING FOR BIG TASK AHEAD

This week saw senators and representatives return to Washington following their annual August break. Most, like Rep. Bill Emerson, R-Cape Girardeau, used at least some of the time for traveling around the districts or states they represent, holding town meetings, speaking to service clubs and the like. Most, like President Bill Clinton, also took some time off to be with family and friends on vacation. So all should be rested for the work that lies ahead. This is good, as it is likely to be a momentous fall.

Action awaits on all 13 of the huge appropriations bills that fund the operation of a federal government currently spending nearly $1.6 trillion. To provide some perspective, in fiscal year 1980, a scant 15 years ago, outgoing President Jimmy Carter turned over to incoming President Ronald Reagan a federal budget that allocated $600 billion to all categories. So federal spending has nearly tripled in that period, the first eight years of which were presided over by Reagan. So much for the alleged heartless budget cuts of those years.

A couple of facts promise to make this fall especially interesting. The first Republican Congress in 40 years has pledged itself to bringing the budget into balance in seven years. This determined legislative majority, beset by the usual divisions between its conservative majority and a smaller but significant moderate faction, confronts a Democratic president who has conceded the GOP budgetary premise -- we must move to balance -- but says he wants to get there in 10 years.

Throughout August, warnings have echoed of a possible train wreck: of legislative and executive branches unable to agree on funding bills, with the resultant shutdown, at the start of the fiscal year, of what are delicately called non-essential functions of government. Once again, some historical perspective is helpful: President Reagan, facing a spendthrift Congress in his first year, permitted this to happen in the fall of 1981. Funny thing: the sun rose and set, the flow of commerce continued, Americans muddled through. In short, life went on. In due course, agreement was reached and normal operations resumed after a few days' disruption.

This fall's drama holds high stakes for both President Clinton and the GOP Congress. With characteristic bluntness, House Speaker Newt Gingrich lays out the choice faced by congressional Republicans: "Either we are a historic majority, or we are going to be the third Republican fluke in the last 50 years." Gingrich the historian is referring to one-term GOP Congresses that followed party landslides in 1946 and 1952.

The House Speaker, however, has already largely delivered. The House passed nine of 10 Contract With America items and sent them on to a more sluggish senate whose majority leader, presidential candidate Bob Dole, now must deliver on much of it or face retribution from Americans who fear the GOP won't go far enough. Poll numbers out this week are instructive: In a Luntz Research survey, only 31 percent of Americans fear the GOP Congress is going too far in enacting the reform agenda favored so overwhelmingly last November. Fully 53 percent fear they won't go far enough.

Over at the White House, every staffer has been reading "Truman," David McCullough's Pulitzer Prize winner, and has dog-eared the chapter on the scrappy Missourian's upset 1948 campaign, when he lambasted the "do-nothing, 80-worst Republican Congress."

Although the president surely remains a player, all eyes are fixed on the senator from Russell, Kan., whose tenure already marks him as one of the titans of 20th century American politics. Whether Bob Dole can deliver will probably determine whether, in his obituary, he ranks with Senate giants such as Robert Taft and Everett Dirksen, or whether he gets a chance at calling 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue a temporary home.