NEWT'S CASH MACHINE

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But even if the special counsel absolves him of wrongdoing, what may be more harmful to Gingrich and his party is the fully lawful success he has had in refining the G.O.P. fund-raising machine, a triumph that has every potential to offend reform-minded voters. By drawing tens of millions of dollars to the Republican campaign chests, Gingrich and the G.O.P. congressional leadership have kept Washington awestruck for months. Republicans came to town promising to decontaminate the political process, to rid it of the corrupting pursuit of "special-interest" money, a chase in which Democrats were the undisputed frontrunners. But in the year since Republicans have taken power in Congress, they appear to have become ... Democrats, and then some.

A case in point: on the same day recently that a House committee removed provisions from a bill that would cut dairy subsidies, the head of the National Milk Producers Federation scheduled a $1,000-a-head fund raiser for Representative Gerald Solomon, the New York Republican largely responsible for the revisions they had been seeking. All sides say they did nothing wrong. Democrats say it still amounts to business as usual. "Newt Gingrich has done a booming business in special-interest quid pro quos," says Don Fowler, co-chairman of the Democratic National Committee.

Sour grapes, say Republicans, the griping of Democrats who used to go yum-yum at the same trough where they now go tsk-tsk. In 1994, before the G.O.P. takeover of Congress, Democrats reaped two-thirds of the money donated by the top 400 political-action committees. During the first six months of this year, it was House Republicans who got nearly 60% of campaign contributions from the same sources. In that same period the National Republican Congressional Committee raised $18.7 million, four times the amount that went to its Democratic counterpart.

Given the probusiness disposition of the G.O.P. agenda--weakening environmental laws or workplace safety regulations, for instance, or making it harder to take manufacturers to court--corporate money probably would have found its way to their side even if the Republicans had done nothing more than leave a night-deposit box on the Capitol steps. But under Gingrich they have been much more aggressive. One of his chief enforcers is majority whip Tom DeLay of Texas, the third-ranking Republican in the House. DeLay is famous around Washington these days for "the book" he keeps in his office. It lists how much each of the 400 largest pacs gave to Republicans over the past two years and how much to Democrats. "Unfriendly'' donors--that's how they are named--are earnestly invited to reform. As DeLay was recently quoted in the Washington Post, "If you want to play in our revolution, you have to live by our rules."