CLINTON VS. CONGRESS: THE RACE IS SET

"It's hard to take seriously that a nation has deep problems," a former French Foreign Minister once said of the U.S., "if they can be fixed with a 50¢-a-gal. gasoline tax." True, at this point it will take more than a 50¢ gas tax to cure the deepest problem facing American government: its massive federal indebtedness. But not very much more. The Senate budget plan balances the budget in seven years by reducing the increase in federal spending from 5% a year to 3%. Even the radical attack on Medicare turns out to be a cut in the annual spending increase from 10% to 7%.

And they call that a revolution.

But revolution is a relative term. And for Democrats, cutting the growth and cherished programs of the New Deal and Great Society is indeed an act of insurrection-which has summoned up its own resistance, generaled by President Clinton. The man who in his Inaugural Address promised to "make change our friend" has turned decidedly unfriendly to change.

This is nowhere more evident than in his 1996 budget, a stunning defense of the status quo. It is a document so devoid of change, so wedded to existing programs, so blithely and defiantly bloated-the Congressional Budget Office calculates that by 2000 it will produce a deficit of $276 billion -- that the Senate rejected it 99 to 0.

Clinton, a man of myriad political skills and few convictions, has found his calling: protector of the welfare state. Protector of Big Bird and school lunches, of Social Security and Medicare, of Davis-Bacon (which mandates inflated union-scale wages for federal construction contracts) and affirmative action (now under a temporizing White House "review "), of the legacy of F.D.R. and L.B.J.

Now, we expect a Democrat to act in defense of traditional Democratic constituencies. But Clinton's attachment to the status quo extends even to a defense of farm subsidies. Republicans, it is reputed, like to target women and children but would never go after agricultural fat cats. Well, the g.o.p. has proposed an $8 billion cut in farm subsidies. Clinton responded with a ringing attack on those who would "turn and walk away from the farmers of this country in the name of cutting spending."

Thus armed, Clinton will run for re-election against the Republican Congress, Truman style. Truman ran against the "do-nothing" 80th Congress. Clinton will run against the "mean-spirited" 104th. His promise-to preserve the basic structure and existing subsidies of the welfare state-is a pure strain of what political analyst Kevin Phillips once termed reactionary liberalism.

One must not, however, underestimate its political appeal or intellectual coherence. Reactionary liberalism has many large constituencies, and its program, for all its passivity, does not lack for logic. Indeed, Clinton's transformation from apostle of change to defender of the faith offers the country an unusually clear ideological choice between two apparent oxymorons: a "revolutionary" conservatism bent on dismantling the great edifice of the New Deal and Great Society and a reactionary liberalism bent on preserving it.