MISSOURI COMMENTARY: CLINTON AND BLAIR: ALIKE, YET NOT ALIKE

It was a week of similarities and a week of contrasts. It was the week of beginnings and a week of endings. It was a week of triumphs and a week of failures. It was a week of victory and a week of exile.

Bill Clinton and Tony Blair. The similarities are obvious. The differences bear watching. Both are young. Both are articulate. Both are "new" -- Clinton the New Democrat; Blair from New Labor. Both are politically adroit. Both are charismatic and telegenic.

Clinton and Blair were both willing to accept that "the era of big government was over." Neither was willing to cut back on the two bedrock principles of continued governmental activism: health care and pensions. Blair was prepared to accept the Conservative budget estimates. He pledged to leave taxes along. He was willing to give up any notion of renationalizing industries. In short, Blair was prepared to be Margaret Thatcher with a human touch. He was educated like a Tory, dressed like a Tory, and went to church like a Tory, but his empathy was with the disadvantaged.

He totally recreated his political party. He cast aside the influence of the labor unions. He shoved the remaining old radicals into a closet. He invented a new political party planted precisely on the middle point of British political spectrum. He triumphed over the tired, scandal-ridden Tories.

Blair's political power and Clinton's political power are quite different. Blair remade his party. New Labor is the creature. Such dissenters as there are within Labor's ranks are made impotent by reason of the staggering margin of Blair's victory.

Clinton did not remake his Congressional party. He is not the prime ministers with a large and docile group of legislators at his command. Many in Clinton's ow party view him askance. On the eve of his budget agreement with the Republicans, a majority of the Democrats -- most certainly in the House and possibly in the Senate -- were poised to march against him.

Clinton has had spectacular success in skillfully shaping a national campaign to get himself elected. He has had virtually no success in getting members of his party elected to Congress. IN 1992, his coattails were non-existent. In 1994, the Democrats in Congress were humiliated. There were no coattails again in 1996. When Clinton deals with Congress, it is by backroom, cross-party horsetrading. Blair will deal with Parliament by thoughtful by gentle command of his majority party.

Bill Clinton and Congress. Who won the budget battle? Henry Clay was known as the Great Compromiser. In contemporary terms, Bill Clinton is the Pretty Great Compromiser. Clinton has decided that balancing the budget will be his one great legacy. He will not be the president who made Social Security or Medicare or campaign finance reform safe for the 21st Century. All of those towering problems will be left to his successors.

The Republicans in Congress got the one thing they desperately wanted: the Democrats will not be able in 1998 or 2000 to run those devastating ads about the GOP socking it to old folks on Medicare. From now on, Republicans and Democrats will both claim to have "saved" Medicare for the elderly. GOP-bashing gets shelved.

Bill Clinton and Franklin Roosevelt. While the budget negotiations were going on, Clinton, the New Democrat, was speaking at the dedication of the memorial of the Old New Dealer.

Insofar as shaping history is concerned, Franklin Roosevelt was a lot luckier than Clinton. FDR had a Great Depression and a Great War to deal with. Clinton has only a Great Economy. We all know that isn't sufficient to achieve a memorial on the Tidal Basin. Ask Harding and Coolidge.

Roosevelt reincarnated would most likely support Clinton's retreat form "big government." FDR was above all an optimist and a pragmatist. He did not believe that all of his programs were eternal. He viewed many of them as being temporary, to last only as long as the economic distress lasted.

Zaire. A world away, we had the week of disaster following disaster. A dreadful leader, Mobutu Sese Seko, gives way to what appears to be an equally dreadful leader, Laurent Kabila. In Africa, more often than not, history does repeat itself. Evil follows evil. Crooks follow crooks. Murderers follow murderers. In Zaire, innocent people will continue to be killed for the sin of being born.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.