WHERE'S THE BEEF?

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The notion that better-funded charities can handle the job, meanwhile, may be fanciful. New York Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, one of the Senate's welfare wise men, says that 30 years ago a proposal like Alexander's might have been possible. But no more. "Sixty-seven percent of the kids in Detroit are on AFDC in the course of a single year," he says. "The Catholic bishops will tell you they can't take care of that." Worse, Alexander's plan could balloon the deficit. His charity tax credit, much of which rewards people for gifts they'd make anyway, would cost $20 billion a year. And thanks to soaring Medicaid costs, the federal-state swap he proposes could add another $50 billion to the deficit by 2000.

On education Alexander revived the 1992 "G.I. Bill for Kids" he wrote as Bush's Education Secretary, which offers vouchers of up to $2,000 for low-income children to use for private school. Like many G.O.P. reformers, Alexander wants to shake up the public-education monopoly and give poor kids a choice, a model that has shown promise in experiments like one in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Still, if Alexander means it when he says trapping kids in bad schools is "incomprehensible," his $1 billion plan, which would reach less than 6% of the 9 million poor kids between the ages of 7 and 17, is only a start.

Alexander's call for a citizen legislature in Washington that would meet only six months a year became a lot less attractive to the G.O.P. rank and file after they swept into power in 1994. His demand on the stump to "cut their pay and send them home" remains a crowd pleaser. But congressional experts are worried that for government to function during the "off season," the President's power to commit troops and spend money would become enhanced far beyond the checks and balances the Constitution envisions. These uncharted waters seem a high price to pay for reforms that stand little chance of luring the teacher- or farmer-statesmen for whom Alexander nostalgically yearns. What schools or farms, after all, can let people go half the year?

If anything, Alexander's call for "a new branch of the armed services" to control illegal drugs and immigration is even more gimmicky. It's also not new. Senator Al D'Amato, the Republican from New York, led a similar charge in the mid-1980s, which the Reagan Administration rebuffed. Long-standing military tradition, codified in the Posse Comitatus Act after the Civil War, bars soldiers from actions that could spill over into arrests and seizures of U.S. citizens. Says Lawrence Korb, a former Reagan Assistant Defense Secretary: "We train them to vaporize, not Mirandize." Alexander says he knows this but offers no details, bridling at the very thought. He'd ask the Joint Chiefs for a plan, he says. That's what Presidents do.

Presidents also make choices. Candidate Alexander hasn't. He promises to "cut taxes on all Americans" and not cut defense. He won't cut spending in ways that "break faith with earlier promises made by government to its citizens," which sounds like a pass on such entitlements as farm subsidies and gold-plated civil service pensions. Then he claims he'll balance the budget; his aides promise details, someday.