NEW PARTY BOSSES

Haley Barbour was worried, and he sounded the alarm. The chairman of the Republican Party knew that organized labor was about to launch the most audacious, best-financed attack his party had ever endured. So two Fridays ago, he brought together a dozen of his party's most powerful leaders. The meeting, in a glass-lined conference room in Republican headquarters on Capitol Hill, included top people from the Christian right, the pro-life movement, Big Business and small business. Barbour told the group that he thought the AFL-CIO's campaign on behalf of the Democrats would be worth far more than the $35 million the union was promising--and perhaps as much as $200 million. The G.O.P. would have to fight back with money and volunteers, he said. Then Barbour went around the table, asking each one, "What do you plan to do?"

The fight burst into the open last week as Congress squabbled over a series of deeply emotional issues inflamed by interest-group pressure. Democrats answered labor's call by trying to raise the minimum wage, but Republicans blocked the move on behalf of business leaders. Playing to the pro-life activists, a solid phalanx of Republicans (and a minority of Democrats) in the House passed a ban on late-term abortions, but President Clinton heard from his pro-choice supporters and promised to veto it. Just days before, the House had voted to repeal the ban on assault weapons, the top item on the National Rifle Association's wish list, although everyone knew Clinton would veto the measure. Amid the posturing, pandering and juggling of symbols, one sound bite rang true. Each party accused the other of being a tool of the special interests. It was hard to disagree.

The notion of Big Labor as a potent force might seem like a relic from the days of sock hops and soda shops. But Barbour and the Republicans were stirred up for good reason. The 13 million-member AFL-CIO tossed the President an early endorsement and backed it up with a special assessment of union dues to bankroll a blitz of saturation advertising, computer-assisted organizing and massive telemarketing. The enterprise amounts to an all-out war by organized labor to turn back the Republican tide of 1994. John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO's new rabble-rousing president, told TIME that he considers the effort "a matter of life and death."

For its counterattack, the G.O.P. is hauling out its biggest guns. The Chamber of Commerce will soon announce the formation of a sprawling new coalition called the Center on the 21st Century Workplace. The center will start by publishing economic studies in support of corporate and government downsizing but then will quickly throw money into a grass-roots effort to downsize the Democrats on Capitol Hill. "Unions have the money and the motivation," the Chamber's Bruce Josten says. "Now the business community is going to get more aggressive in return."