INAUGURATION WILL USHER IN BLEAK REALITIES

Political campaigns, tawdry as they often may be, are occasionally infused with small dreams dreams of what might be done if power were transferred from thee to me. Governance, crass as it often may be, is infused with booming realities realities of what cannot be done even if power were transferred from thee to me. This week, Bill Clinton will move from dreams to realities, from good intentions to cruel facts. Inauguration Day, with all its excitement and hoopla, has a cold shower waiting at the end of the last waltz.

Clinton would like to cut the budget deficit in half in the next four years. He would like to give middle income taxpayers (those earning below $80,000) a tax cut. He wants to spend more on: our rusting infrastructure, job training, developing new manufacturing expertise, education, health care, AIDS research and more. He can't do it all. "The math does not work," says outgoing Budget Director Richard Darman, the high apostle of magical math. The budget deficit is getting worse, not better. Without being reigned in, the deficit will grow automatically from its current $300 billion to $400 billion in four years or so.

The operative word is "automatic." Most of federal spending is on an automatic pilot. "Entitlements," they are called, self-generate every year as the governmental clock ticks on. Social Security, Medicare, the Civil Service Retirement System, the Military Retirement System and others make automatic and escalating claims on the budget.

Inviting 400 hundred people to Little Rock was more than an exercise in public relations. It was an exercise in public education.

The American people know that our deep-rooted problems, both fiscal and social, are not going to be resolved on the cheap or by prayer. Of course, most people aren't eagerly seeking such pain for themselves better the pain be allocated to the guy across town. But pain there will be and Clinton will have to be about allocating it sooner than later. Presidential popularity isn't simply the plaything of pollsters; it is the coin of the political realm which the president prudently spends for the national good. Clinton will have to start spending it early on when he comes to reconcile the competing promises of the 1992 campaign.

His key budget people, Leon Panetta and Alice Rivilin, are pushing Clinton in the direction of combining two-thirds budget cuts and one-third tax increases. That's a crapshooter's formula when the economy is recovering less than robustly. "Everything is on the table," Panetta tells Congress: constraints on Social Security and Medicare, gasoline tax, pollution tax, energy tax, even some type of consumption tax. Any one of these is political dynamite; multiple combination of these would be political extinction.

Thomas Jefferson and his entourage rode from Monticello to Washington in three days at a cost of under $100. Bill Clinton will make a faster journey, but face infinitely greater national expenses at the end of the happy ride.