COMPROMISES CAMOUFLAGE RIGID CONGRESSIONAL SCHISM.

Byline: Robert Rankin Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

After more than a year of bitter stalemate between President Clinton and the Republican Congress, compromises are bursting out like spring flowers.

They finally struck a budget deal. Earlier this month they enacted an anti-terrorism bill, overhauled farm price supports and awarded the presidency a kind of line-item veto power. There is even bipartisan movement on a modest health-care reform bill.

But be not misled. There is less bipartisanship than meets the eye. Compromise has been minimal. The big disputes dividing Democrats from Republicans and Clinton from Congress remain unresolved. Voters will still face very different choices in November between rival visions of the role of government in American life.

``The theory that this (trend of compromises) somehow represents a repudiation on the part of the Republicans of their fundamental agenda is not well-founded,'' said David Mason, vice president of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. ``The trend I would read is less of an ideological compromise than a recognition of political reality.

``The Republicans have narrow majorities on Capitol Hill and a president firmly in opposition to a lot of their programs, so they have to figure out what they can get done,'' Mason said.

Clinton and the Democrats face similar limits. And both sides are eager to build some kind of record of achievement to lay before voters in November - hence the recent compromises.

So what at first blush looks like a triumph of centrist politics, may be more of an exercise by both sides in political tactics to improve their images.

``I don't think it's a triumph of the center. I think that's an optimistic assessment that doesn't have any bearing in reality,'' said Bert A. Rockman, a political scientist at the University of Pittsburgh.

Take the recent budget deal, for example. True, both sides compromised. Republicans managed to trim spending by $23 billion below the year before. Clinton managed to save many programs that Republicans previously had tried to kill or cripple.

But their compromise hardly resolved their great budget showdown. It involved only $160 billion - one-tenth of the federal budget. It covered only the five months remaining in fiscal 1996. And Republicans compromised only because they were uniquely vulnerable politically if they failed to do so.

That's because Clinton vowed to veto the measure unless the GOP yielded. A veto of this bill either would have caused another government shutdown or would have forced Congress to adopt its 14th stopgap funding bill this fiscal year.

Either way, Clinton could have renewed his rhetoric castigating Republicans as extremists willing to disable the government, as he did with incredible success during the two previous shutdowns, resurrecting himself politically.

Republicans want nothing more than to put the image-damaging politics of shutdowns and budget stalemates behind them and change the subject before the elections. So they compromised - but only on 10 percent of the budget, and only through September.

They did not compromise on Medicare, Medicaid or other benefit programs that together consume two-thirds of federal spending, and over which Democrats and Republicans remain deeply divided. They did not compromise their goals of chopping back Clinton's programs in ensuing budgets - starting Oct. 1.

Prospects for compromise on the big budget questions are decidedly dim. As House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, R-Ohio, put it: `If the president wants to keep all the programs in Washington and trim around the edges . . . we won't be a part of it.''

Even in compromising as little as they did, Republicans did not really move to the center on most programs involved.

On environmental protection, for example, Republicans stuck by terms blocking the Environmental Protection Agency's power to protect wetlands. Their compromise still transfers that authority to the pro-development Army Corps of Engineers - it just lets Clinton waive that change. That negates it in effect, but the GOP stood by it in principle - and left it in the bill.

Similarly, House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., called this week for ``a new environmentalism'' that would protect nature, just less bureaucratically. His words reflected evident sensitivity to polls showing large majorities unsympathetic to GOP efforts to rewrite environmental laws.

Yet despite such gestures toward the political center, on Wednesday the GOP-led House still voted over Democratic opposition to open wildlife refuges to more commercial exploitation.

Other recent examples of bipartisan compromise are similarly limited. Even advocates of the anti-terrorism law admitted it would not have prevented the Oklahoma City bombing and is limited in its scope.

The line-item veto was not a compromise between partisans, but between rival institutions - Congress and the presidency. The farm price reform was a victory for free-market Republicans, but even in signing it, Clinton vowed to seek revisions next year.

The emerging health-care reform faces a Clinton veto unless terms dear to House Republicans are deleted. Even if a compromise is struck, the measure aims at fairly narrow reforms, failing to address such large problems as the fact that 37 million Americans lack health insurance.

Meanwhile, Clinton promised ``to end welfare as we know it,'' but twice vetoed GOP welfare-reform bills as too extreme. And the hottest controversy in Washington today pits Democrats against Republicans over raising the minimum wage, with recent signs of compromise fading fast.

The recent compromise trend thus does not change the choice facing voters in November. Republicans remain dedicated to reducing the federal government's role in American life, Democrats to using it as a tool to improve society. Splitting power between them mainly produces stalemate tempered by modest compromises.

``You really need to have the same party in very substantial power in both branches (of government) to make really big things happen most of the time,'' said the University of Pittsburgh's Rockman. ``Voters are kind of wary whether they want to do that. . . . They complain about the stalemate, but in the end they come back to it. That's really what they want, because they are afraid of either party going too far.''