MISSOURI COMMENTARY: GAINS, LOSSES IN BUDGET STALEMATE

The shutdown/budget battle between the Republican Congress and the Democratic president is the opening gun of the 1996 presidential campaign. The president is trying to define himself as a sensible moderate who wants a balanced budget -- but not one that assaults American core political values. What are those values at this particular time? Medicare, Medicaid, environmental protection and aid to education.

Just a year ago, the president suffered a humiliating defeat in the 1994 congressional elections. There were multiple reasons for the debacle, but chief amongst them was the collapse of his and his wife's health-care plan. The public deemed it too complex and too infested with the heavy hand of government. Its central core was the creation of health-care alliances to provide less expensive managed care to the American people.

Speaker Newt Gingrich and Majority Leader Bob Dole are trying to define themselves as the men who can balance the budget regardless of the pain involved. They are faced with the burden of bringing down health-care costs. They want to balance the budget in seven years. They can't touch interest on the national debt. They won't touch Social Security or defense. Simultaneously, they want to cut taxes by $245 billion. That leaves Medicare and Medicaid as big-ticket items to be targeted where hundreds of billions can be saved if you begin moving seniors into cheaper managed care programs.

On the issue of health care, the Gingrich and Dole of this year have in political terms traded places with the Clinton of last year. It is they who are rocking the health-care boat. They are finding that American elderly, near-elderly and sons and daughters of the elderly want to maintain as is the current expensive, government-financed system. Clinton found that out -- the hard way -- a year ago.

There's nothing surprising in all of this. People are enthused about balanced budgets until it affects specific popular programs. It's one thing to sock it to welfare mothers. It's another thing when you start cutting back on programs dealing with middle-class America. Medicare is America's health care for the rich and moderately well-off elderly. Medicaid has become, over time, a basic nursing home provider for the elderly of various financial means. When politicians fool around with these sacred cows, the theoretical goal of a balanced budget begins to dim.

According to current polls, Clinton and the Democrats in Congress are winning this political war on health care this year, just as they lost the health-care war last year. Clinton has improved in the polls and breathes easier now that the man who had the best chance to defeat him, Gen. Colin Powell, is out of the race.

Democrats in Congress are encouraged by their four- to six-point generic lead over Republicans. A word of geographical caution on that before the champagne bottles are opened: the South.

Earlier in this century, there were no Republican House members from the South. From Reconstruction on, blacks were the most loyal Republican voters below the Mason-Dixon line, while whites voted Dixie Democrat. It's now almost completely switched. Take a look at Georgia. Just a few years ago, the entire Georgia House delegation was Democratic except for one seat belonging to Gingrich. Today, there are three black Democrats and eight white Republicans. Sam Nunn, D-Ga., soon to retire, is the only white Democrat in the Georgia congressional delegation.

The Goldwater campaign, George Wallace's independent bid in 1968, Richard Nixon's "Southern Strategy," Ronald Reagan's popularity and Bill Clinton's unpopularity in the South have all attracted white southerners to the Republican Party. President George Bush's Justice Department eagerly joined with black activists in using the Voting Rights Act to ensure the creation of odd-shaped black congressional districts, leaving the other districts virtually all white -- and all Republican.

The South now stands as the support base of the Republican Party in the House. Every Republican House leader except one comes from the South: Gingrich, Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas. In the Senate, Trent Lott, R-Miss., is the likely next Republican leader.

Whatever House seats the Democrats may regain elsewhere in the nation, they may lose even more in the South. Race, guns, abortion, and gay rights are issues that play with intensity in the white South.

Democrats once counted on the "Solid South." Now the Republicans do. Republicans in 1994 counted on the balanced budget. Democrats in 1996 will count on Medicare and Medicaid.

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