THE MOST UNKINDEST CUT

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The White House strategy has been to hope the G.O.P. would call for massive cuts in Medicare, which the Administration could then tag as an effort to balance the budget on the backs of senior citizens -- much as it scored points off earlier Republican efforts to reform the school-lunch program. In January's State of the Union speech, Clinton said he would not allow the Republicans to slash Medicare to pay for tax cuts, a line he took up again in a speech before 2,200 senior citizens attending the decennial White House Conference on Aging -- as it happened, the day after Dole and Gingrich's fiasco. "The Republicans promised they could balance the budget, cut taxes for the wealthy and leave Medicare and Social Security unharmed," Stephanopoulos told TIME. Clinton made the point more finely in his speech: "It is wrong simply to slash Medicare to pay for tax cuts for people who are well off."

That puts the G.O.P. in a major quandary. Putting a lid on Medicare and its $90 billion sister program, Medicaid, represents the Republicans' best hope for achieving much of the $1.4 trillion in savings they must find if they are to balance the budget and pay for tax cuts. But over their April recess, G.O.P. polls began showing that people are just as protective of Medicare as they are of Social Security.

By late April, Republicans had begun to settle on a strategy of avoiding talking about Medicare as a budget issue and instead offering to reform the system to save it. But they were quickly tripped up by loose talk from Gingrich. In an April 28 speech to a conservative seniors' group, Gingrich offered to put Medicare reform on a separate track from consideration of the budget-a move that left even budget wizard Kasich scratching his head over what Gingrich meant. With Social Security and interest on the debt off the table, the budget simply cannot be balanced by 2002 without major savings from Medicare and Medicaid. "We were doing fine until Newt stumbled," House Republican Conference Chairman John Boehner of Ohio told Time. "He jumped before all the rest of us were briefed and were on board with the direction we were going."

Republicans are naturally leery of touching a program that many term a third rail of U.S. politics. But the White House, by resorting to an approach that an aide described as "demagoguing" the issue, risks having to deal with G.O.P. charges that it is "taking a walk" on both Medicare's survival and balancing the budget. In fact, in his speech to the elderly last week, Clinton made clear he would continue to punt on questions of Medicare and reducing the deficit until Republicans produce their own specific plans.