HARRIED PARK RANGERS GAVE carloads of distraught tourists the bad news. Washington was closing the Grand Canyon. The entrance to the national park, that is, along with Yosemite, the Everglades and federal facilities from the Statue of Liberty in New York to Alcatraz in San Francisco. Nearly 800,000 federal workers streamed from the Smithsonian Institution, libraries, laboratories, and social security and passport offices across the country on Nov. 14, sent home on unpaid leave after the government's authority to spend money on "nonessential" services lapsed.

The fifth and longest government shutdown in 14 years upset workers and frustrated many Americans. The fbi ceased training local law-enforcement agents. The Centers for Disease Control suspended studying current aids cases. More than 50,000 phone calls poured hourly into the Capitol Hill switchboard complaining about the shutdown. Still, with essential services maintained, the budget impasse between congressional Republicans and the Democratic President was less crisis than a shifting of tectonic political plates across party fault lines. "It's just more evidence," said Harriet Woods, director of the National Women's Political Caucus, "that government can't get its act together."

That's true, except in this case the government is not working in sync because the Executive and Legislative branches have conflicting priorities and competing philosophies. They are deadlocked over demands from Republicans, who control the congressional purse strings, that the Clinton Administration balance the budget within seven years and cut taxes by a mother of all windfalls: $245 billion. To accomplish the former while circumscribed by the latter, the White House would have to slice hundreds of programs and restructure the nation's social safety net, reducing not the medical and welfare benefits themselves but projected increases in payouts.

Clinton refuses to do that because, while he has offered no credible budget himself, he believes the congressional proposals are skewed to favor the rich at the expense of the disadvantaged and elderly. He also refuses to commit to the seven-year time frame, holding out for the less-painful austerities of a nine-year plan.

Republicans, who seized control of Capitol Hill last year when Americans voted that they were ready to cut spending, used the national debt ceiling as leverage to push their Contract with America reforms. The ceiling, currently at $4.9 trillion, would have been breached Wednesday, so Congress offered a stopgap spending measure to tide the government over until December, but at the price of tying the President to the seven years. Clinton vetoed the bill, saying that the Republican budget, which intends to cut spending by roughly $1 trillion, "requires a level of cuts in Medicare and Medicaid, in education, in the environment and a tax increase on working people, all of which I find highly objectionable."

The U.S. would have suffered its first default in history, triggering an international financial crisis, had Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin not borrowed $61.3 billion from two civil service retirement funds to cover interest payments due on the debt. The markets suffered no panic because there was never any real question that the U.S. would default, and Rubin can juggle the federal books for weeks. Indeed, New York Stock Exchange shares jumped 110 points during the week in apparent anticipation that the budget brawl would eventually lead to spending cuts and lower tax and interest rates. Nonetheless, as Rubin pointed out, "this is no way for a great nation to manage its financial affairs."

No, it's not, but business has been anything but usual since Republicans decided to use their victory last year as a fulcrum for crusading change. As a result, the parties are tugging and wheezing in the first genuine effort in decades to clean up the nation's fiscal disarray. "We're talking about fundamental changes in the way our government does business, the size of government and the types of activities it can undertake," said Robert Reischauer, director of the Congressional Budget Office from 1989 until earlier this year. "This is the sort of serious debate that should lead to a fight, a real donnybrook."

What's unfortunate is that this fight is being waged in the shadow of a 1996 presidential race in which incumbent Clinton is running for re-election, Senate majority leader Bob Dole is the front runner for the Republican nomination for President and Newt Gingrich, the Republican Speaker of the House, is contemplating joining the contest, which will almost certainly turn on this very issue. The result has been a jockeying for political advantage that turned legitimate debate into petulant bickering. "My constituents are very frustrated and are saying that the politicians are being too political," said Representative Lee Hamilton, the former Democratic chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. "The real feeling is we are not doing our job."

The low point in the standoff may have come when Gingrich admitted last week that a fit of pique prompted him to tack tougher conditions on the stopgap legislation Clinton vetoed. The President, said the Speaker, affronted him while flying to and from Israel for Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin's funeral by failing to discuss the budget aboard Air Force One, then had him and Dole use the plane's rear exit on returning to Washington. "This is petty, but I think it's human," Gingrich told reporters. "You just wonder, Where is their sense of manners? Where's their sense of courtesy?" His comments met instant ridicule and wonderment about where his sense of proportion was. "Quit the whining; let's get on with the real business here," said Senate minority leader Tom Daschle. The New York Daily News ran a front-page cartoon of the Speaker as an infant in diapers with the headline CRY BABY. Gingrich backers cringed. Fumed freshman Representative Thomas Davis of Virginia: "We look like idiots."

True enough, but despite the squabbling, House Republicans had pulled together sufficiently by Friday to pass a sweeping budget bill that would roll back Democratic spending programs that first came on the books during Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal legislation in the 1930s. Passed 237 to 189 along party lines, the Balanced Budget Act of 1995 would cut $270 billion from Medicare for the elderly, $163 billion from Medicaid for the poor, $82 billion from welfare and lesser amounts from farm subsidies and student-loan programs. The Senate considered a similar version of the bill over the weekend. Clinton was not expected to receive the legislation until early this week, but he has promised to veto it. Republicans hope voters will conclude that Clinton is uninterested in trimming the deficit. Comments like Dole's last week that "he's made it pretty clear he doesn't want a balanced budget" are aimed at reinforcing the impression.

Democrats are beginning to worry that such criticism may stick, but it hasn't yet. A mid-week poll found that 49% to 26%, Americans blamed Republican leaders more than President Clinton for the deadlock. The President's most effective defense has been an aggressive offense portraying Gingrich, Dole and Co. as heartless healthcare slashers. "I favor balancing the budget, but not if it's going to undermine our basic values and the strength of our economy," Clinton said. Displaying a resolve previously almost nonexistent, he has promised to stay the distance. "I'm not going to go for it. Ninety days, 120 days, 180 days, if we take it right into the next election, let the American people decide."

That will be exactly what happens if both sides hold their ground. The shutdown won't last that long. After the President vetoes the Republican budget this week, both sides will work out a way to reopen federal facilities and avoid default. Then, next November, who and what is "essential" will be determined not at the ends of Pennsylvania Avenue but in every voting booth in America.