MISSOURI COMMENTARY: CONTRACT IS SMUDGED AT THE EDGES

It's far too early to write a political obituary for the Republican Contract With America. But it isn't too early to say that the contract is getting a bit smudged around the edges.

Welfare reform went through the House by a vote of 244-199. The bill dealt with some of the best known public assistance programs, including Aid to Families With Dependent Children, food stamps and school lunches. As many as 45 states could administer as they choose largely free of federal rules.

The most controversial proposal was the one banning any payments to unwed teen-age mothers living away from home or for children born of mothers already on welfare. Recipients would have to find work after two years or lose their benefits and families would be removed after five years. The bill goes now to the Senate.

The House welfare bill is premised on certain presumptions as yet unproven. The presumption is that state governments are wise and prudent managers of expensive social programs, that unwed teen-agers will definitively alter their behavior because of legislative changes and that sufficient jobs are available for unskilled, semi-literate women with no work experience whatsoever.

In any event, score welfare reform as a win for the contract. So too the line-item veto.

On tax cuts, the Republicans split apart. President Bill Clinton, in his early days in office, indulged in the foolishness of saying we must spend more money in order to better balance the budget. The Contract With America claims that a good way to balance the budget faster is to cut taxes (mostly for the well-to-do). Clinton couldn't convince the public of his "logic" on spend-to-cut. Speaker Newt Gingrich can't convince the public on cut-taxes-to-balance. As columnist David Broder put it, Gingrich is "repeating step-by-step the very tactics that so severely damaged the Clinton presidency in 1993."

So 102 Republican House members, including 35 freshman and 10 committee chairmen, wrote a letter asking Gingrich to rework his tax-cut proposal. Up until now, the freshmen have been the speaker's most loyal troops. Sen. Robert Packwood, chairman of the tax-writing Finance Committee, added some fuel to the fire saying that tax cuts at this time were "foolhardy." Gingrich's sidekick, Majority Leader Dick Armey, got furious with all of this "disloyalty." He threatened to use the ultimate weapon of punishment: calling Rush Limbaugh and asking him to be the enforcer.

The term-limit fiasco came at midweek. Polls showed this, along with the constitutional amendment to balance the budget, to be the most attractive piece of the contract. Voters used to hate Congress as a whole, but rather liked their own local members of Congress. Now voters hate Congress as a whole as well as their own guy. So pros like Gingrich and Armey tried to fashion some contrivance that would allow them to serve well into old age while still pandering to the public's angry mood.

It didn't work. The term-limit constitutional amendment was bludgeoned on four separate votes in the House of Representatives. Most members of Congress, whether Republican or Democratic, are philosophically opposed to term-limits.

The fight against term-limits was led by one of the more powerful Republicans, Henry Hyde of Illinois, chairman of the Judiciary Committee. His rousing speech drew standing ovations from Republicans and Democrats and enormous applause from the gallery. "I just can't be an accessory to the dumbing down of democracy ... Have we nothing to learn from the past? Tradition, history, institutional memory -- don't they county anymore?"

Gingrich gave the principal speech in support of term-limits without evoking an enthusiastic response. "The will of the American people is sovereign," he said, meaning in this context, the polling results should rule the day.

Politics is a mixture of thought, timing and luck -- especially timing and luck. Last year, Clinton missed the optimal political curve on health-care reform, support for which had peaked when he finally got around to introducing his proposals. Has the optimal moment for the Contract With America already passed?

The balanced-budget constitutional amendment died in the Senate. Term limits died in the House. The nasty nitty gritty of cutting popular programs like Medicare looms on the horizon. The Republican Senate is not in lock step with Gingrich -- indeed, it doesn't want to be.

Gingrich had better launch his spring offensive.

~Tom Eagleton is a former U.S. senator from Missouri and a columnist for the Pulitzer Publishing Co.