A budget lost.

THE CAUSE of the budget disaster are clear enough. The problem springs not from any national lapse of common sense, but from specific, characteristic, and worsening flaws in the Reagan Administration's political style.

Strategic genius and tactical timidity have become the Administration's hallmarks. Since 1982, when Congress welched on its agreement to cut spending in return for the TEFRA tax hike, Ronald Reagan's budget strategy has been simple and brilliant. Absolutely, positively refuse to raise taxes and, therefore, projected revenues. (Real revenues are less important in the budget debate.) Because high deficit numbers seem to frighten congressmen and their consituents more than high spending figures, refusing to fall back on tax increases to narrow the projected deficit would set some limit to congressional profligacy.

Senator Moynihan distorted the President's policy by claiming he had deliberately created monster deficits to force program cuts. But there is no doubt that Mr. Reagan has been playing "chicken" with congressional big-spenders. The psychological aspect of the strategy was the most important: Reagan's resolve and his unquestioned ability to sustain a veto of any tax bill caused wholsale despair among big-spenders. Many publicly declared their belief in the President's immovability and the consequent need for spending cuts.

In other words, the strategy worked. After weeks of massive bombing raids, the enemy's supply lines had been effectively severed, his infrastructure destroyed, his communications disrupted. He had been softened up nicely for the big ground assualt--the tedious, costly, but necessary hamlet-by-hamlet struggle for territory aching to be taken. It never came. Ronald Reagan, brilliant strategist, inveterate political optimist, but chronically unwilling to take casualties, preferred to stick with the air war and hope for the best result from the confusion below.

To be fair, he did propose a budget, back in February, and it too was strategically brilliant. For the first time in decades a President seriously proposed to eliminate major programs, almost two dozen of them, mostly well-chosen special-interest preserves with narrow, if intense, popular support. True, Reagan's budget would not have saved much more than the $555 billion Congress claims to have saved in the budget it approved August 1. But Reagan's program eliminations would have meant permanent cuts. Next year new ground could have been taken. Under Congress's timid budget, which eliminates but one major program, the same battles will have to be fought all over again in 12 months, with no guarantee of better success. The President, with his strategic vision, offered a budget worth fighting for.

Then, almost immediately, it disappeared. The President, apparently senistized by the media's year of portraying him as an uncaring skinflint, seemed unwilling publicly to associate himself with the fight for any particular cut. He made no serious effort to sell the budget's virtues, its populist thrust, to the people. Granted the President was preoccupied with tax reform, and tax reform is more important. Still, a blitz and quick victory on the budget would have augmented Reagan's own political authority and boosted Congress's and the country's confidence in the government's ability to handle its financial affairs, thus bracing them for the risks of tax reform. Without Reagan on the ground, however, defeat was inevitable. Yet, against a woozy enemy, victory would have been just as inevitable had the battle ever been joined. An important opportunity has been lost.