FOLLOW--OR MOVE OVER

POLITICS ABHORS A VACUUM, AND Newt Gingrich last week was feeling its tug. Even before Senate majority leader Bob Dole's uninspired performance during Wednesday's televised forum in New Hampshire for G.O.P. presidential candidates, Gingrich had phoned key Republicans around the country and wondered aloud whether he should launch his own bid for the White House. Already on the previous Saturday, over dinner at the Connecticut home of Henry and Nancy Kissinger, Gingrich had fretted about Dole and launched into a detailed analysis of his own presidential chances.

Gingrich is clashing with two different Bob Doles. The Speaker can't control Dole the campaigner, but he needs to have influence over Dole the Senator in order to push through the extensive collection of spending cuts and tax reductions promised in the Contract with America. So last week the Speaker took control of the legislative stream, persuading Dole to create a task force of House and Senate leaders designed in part to ensure that the Senate majority leader and other moderate Senate Republicans would not unilaterally trade away elements of Gingrich's revolution in the final days of congressional bargaining. The Speaker also anointed himself the Hill's master strategist and tactician. When the time came for Republicans to take a harder line toward Bill Clinton, it was Gingrich, not Dole, who set the tone. And when the time came to secure a powerful ally for the G.O.P.'s embattled overhaul of Medicare, it was Gingrich, not Dole, who cut the deal, by winning--some would say buying--the endorsement of the influential American Medical Association.

Gingrich's message to Dole is simple: Follow me, or get out of the way. In leaking to allies his latest presidential ambitions, the Speaker sought to make it appear that what worries him is a presidential run by Colin Powell, since the general is an avowed moderate who might threaten the Speaker's agenda. Of Powell's candidacy, Gingrich spokesman Tony Blankley says, "As long as the Speaker is reasonably assured that whoever the standard bearer is going to be is willing and able to carry the message of the revolution through the campaign, then he is very happy being Speaker."

But those words are directed as much at Dole as at Powell. In public last week, Dole and Gingrich made unusually overt displays of cooperation--twice holding joint press conferences to castigate the White House for failing to negotiate in good faith. In private, hard feelings are hardening. Dole suggested two weeks ago on national television that Republicans might not be able to deliver all the $245 billion in tax cuts they have promised. The admission so infuriated Gingrich that he telephoned three prominent Republican Governors and told them, in effect, "I've had it with this guy." Although the Senate Finance Committee unveiled a proposal for the full tax cut last Friday, Gingrich knows as well as Dole that it is unlikely to survive negotiations with the White House. What Gingrich couldn't believe was that Dole would show his cards in the middle of the poker game, thus panicking freshman Republican lawmakers and corporate interest groups.