BILL'S OTHER PROBLEM.

Not Paula but the party

On the same day that the front pages were reporting the Supreme Court's ruling that Paula Jones can pursue her sexual harassment suit against President Bill Clinton, the inside pages noted a story far more important to Clinton's legacy and to voters. Call it the big news: The Collapse of the Clinton Consensus.

The story took the form of a cross-country barrage of words between Vice-President Al Gore and House Democratic Leader Richard Gephardt over trade with China and the recent budget deal. Speaking in Detroit, Gephardt came out hard against the administration's decision to continue China's trading privileges. He charged that the Clinton policy has been "far too weak when it comes to China" and its human-rights violations.

Gore's immediate response from New Hampshire may have made Gephardt smile. Gore insisted that the administration wasn't satisfied with China's progress on human rights either, but that "what they choose to do is not entirely in our control." That may be true, but it didn't sound strong.

The fighting between Gore and Gephardt on China and also on the Clinton-Lott budget deal--Gephardt opposed it, Gore loyally defended it--was rightly interpreted as the preliminary jousting for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. But Gephardt's and Gore's personal ambitions are less important than what their fight says about Clinton's largest political achievement: his success in recasting the Democratic party and uniting it on new ground. That project is in big trouble.

When Clinton ran for president in 1992, he set out to bury some of the issues that had divided Democrats in the past and to forge agreement on questions that threatened to divide it in the future. Clinton has been quite successful in plowing under old issues. On two big sets of questions--crime and (perhaps ironically in light of the Court's Paula Jones decision) family values--Clinton helped Democrats overcome a quarter-century of squabbling and setbacks. Clinton's initiatives on guns and more cops have been accompanied by falling crime rates. Democrats are seen as tough enough.

On the problems faced by families, Clinton has redefined the debate. It is now less a vague argument about "permissiveness" and much more about education and the time pressures faced by working families. Democrats aren't fighting much about these issues, and Republicans are at a loss.

But the Clinton consensus has not worked on what are the new wedge issues inside the Democratic party: trade, human rights, and public spending. Even on these matters, Clinton succeeded for a while. He united most of his party around his successful 1993 budget and in his fight against the Republicans' 1995 budget. Initially, he pledged to be far tougher on China's human-rights violations than President George Bush was. He promised that free-trade accords would be accompanied by international agreements on the environment and labor rights.

But on each of these issues, Clinton altered his course. On China, he embraced Bush's policy of (depending on your point of view) accommodation or engagement. This angered human-rights advocates. On trade, open markets have taken priority over negotiating social protections. In deciding to deal with the Republicans on the budget, Clinton bought into both a set of tax cuts that many Democrats despise and a lid on domestic spending that many of them say can't or shouldn't hold.

The Democratic split on these questions has given Gephardt his opening. But neither Gephardt nor Gore nor any other Democrat will find it easy to win unless some version of the Clinton consensus is reestablished. And finding unity is harder for the party in the White House than out. Trade could blow the party apart, and so could a Clinton decision to sign tax cuts unacceptable to a majority of Democrats.

The fraying inside the party is a particular challenge to Gore. One test of whether he shares Clinton's gift for maneuvering, says an influential Democrat neutral in the presidential race, is whether he can broker agreement between the party's free traders and advocates of international rules on labor, the environment, and human rights. But to do this, he needs Clinton's blessing.

The Paula Jones case is a serious embarrassment to Clinton, and the Court deprived him of an easy way out. He may now have to settle the case to prevent further damage. But the larger threat to Clinton's hopes for history comes not from Ms. Jones, but from his fellow Democrats. The president who would be the "the healer of the breach" needs to heal the widening breach in his own party.

E.J. dionne, Jr., is the author of They Only Look Dead (Simon & Schuster) and a syndicated columnist. [C] 1997, Washington Post Writers Group.