FOLLOW--OR MOVE OVER

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GINGRICH WAS STILL CALMING THEM down last week. Dole's statement forced Gingrich to invite 150 lobbyists to a windowless room in the Capitol basement on Thursday to reassure them that the tax cuts were still on track. "We're approaching this as a team," Gingrich and other top Republicans told the lobbyists, who helped finance hundreds of G.O.P. campaigns and who were counting on fresh tax breaks. The 9 a.m. meetings of the newly created task force, the Speaker promised, would ensure that such mistakes did not take place again. Yet Dole did not attend the session.

Those closest to Gingrich insist he is unlikely to pursue the G.O.P. nomination. But party members who have spoken with him recently say he is fully briefed on the mechanics of a race, can recite filing deadlines for early primaries and confidently informs anyone who asks that 55% of convention delegates can break their pledges and vote for a favorite son. He has also bragged that Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson and Massachusetts Governor William Weld have urged him to run, and he believes an announcement would activate thousands of his supporters nationwide.

But at least partly to avoid the distraction from which Dole is suffering, Gingrich is unlikely to jump in while Congress is still in session this year. His major challenge as a budget cutter is getting $270 billion out of projected Medicare spending over the next seven years, which became more difficult when polls this fall began to show that the public thinks the Republicans would penalize seniors to give tax breaks to the rich. The Speaker had been looking for a celebrity endorser who could rally seniors to the cause, and last week he found one in the A.M.A. Who could be better than a family doctor? "Once the doctor says, 'Yes, we will be there to provide care,' that fills an important segment of doubt that seniors might have had about our policy,'' says Blankley.

But what elderly patients are not likely to hear from their doctors is that in exchange for their support, they will actually receive higher Medicare payments than they could have expected under current law. When doctors argued that the present arrangement is unfair and does not reward them for practicing more economically, Republicans rewrote the complicated funding formulas to boost payments to doctors, even as their patients, hospitals and other groups with a stake in the program were feeling the pinch. Yet the peculiar math of federal budgeting will still allow both the House and Senate bills to claim "savings" of at least $23 billion in those fees over the next seven years. The higher fees were among many bouquets Gingrich handed out to doctors during their long courtship. Among the others: new protection against malpractice suits, new approvals for referring patients to doctor-owned labs and a new opportunity for doctors to form their own managed-care networks under financially generous rules that do not apply to regular hmos.