Not Our Finest Hour

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Next week the 98th Congress, which will be more liberal and Democratic than the one that staggered offstage last week, will convene. With 84 new members, it will have to get organized all over again. Some time in January, Reagan will send it his budget plan for fiscal 1984, with projections of another huge deficit, this one exceeding $150 billion. The President will be confronted with growing skepticism about his economic nostrums. Members are not likely to take gracefully such naive proposals for confronting unemployment as the one Reagan tossed out at a press conference last week: that there would be more than enough jobs for the 12 million currently out of work if each of the nation's 15 million businesses hired just one more worker. The President did not take into account the fact that three-quarters of these businesses are small owner-operated enterprises, most with receipts of less than $25,000 a year, that could not afford more employees, or use them. Taking a more realistic tack, Howard Baker has promised that the new Congress will take up a jobs measure similar to the one Reagan threatened to veto.

The efficient functioning of the incoming Congress will depend on the ability of moderate Senate Republicans, like Baker and Robert Dole of Kansas, to broker consensus policies acceptable to both Reagan and the House Democratic leadership. For this to work, Helms and his band of renegade Republicans must be controlled better than they were during the lameduck session. In addition, Reagan, who up to now has had great success in persuading Congress to do his bidding, must show that he also has the flexibility to work with the institution when it asserts more independence. Otherwise, the pendulum will swing from a Congress that once had blind faith in Reagan's policies to one that is blindly determined to stop them. —By Walter Isaacson. Reported by Neil MacNeil and Evan Thomas/Washington