CONGRESS FRESHMEN FACE REALITY AT GOP RETREAT.

Byline: Jerry Gray The New York Times

The freshmen who marched into Washington at the head of the Republican revolution a year ago met here Friday for a midterm retreat, where they planned to lick their wounds from a year of battles and to gather strength for another charge at big government.

Instead, they heard themselves lambasted by conservative hard-liners, whose visions made even the sternest among them blink.

A year has gone by and almost none of the ambitious Republican agenda has become law, speaker after speaker thundered Friday morning, as the freshmen and some sophomores listened, seemingly in shock.

Others on the program said the Republicans should never have relented on their strategy of forcing the federal government to shut down to force President Clinton to accept the Republican budget.

"When you had the government down, you should have left it down," Al Dunlap, a conservative who is the chief executive of Scott Paper Co., told the Republican lawmakers at a midmorning meeting. The strategy was hurting Republicans in the polls, Dunlap acknowledged, but they still should have held fast.

"No job is worth having that isn't worth losing for doing the right thing," he said.

While those who spoke at the retreat did not mention House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Georgia, by name, some of their anger was apparently directed at the speaker, who has deferred action on issues unpopular with many lawmakers but dear to the hearts of conservatives, like term limits.

About 50 of the 73 Republican freshmen and 14 of the sophomores in the House of Representatives arrived in Baltimore on Thursday evening for the two-day retreat, organized by two conservative groups, the Heritage Foundation, a research center, and Empower America, a public-policy organization.

They brought in a number of conservatives, including William Bennett, the former education secretary and drug czar who is a founder of Empower America; Edwin J. Feulner Jr., president of the Heritage Foundation; Dr. Wade Horn, director of the National Fatherhood Initiative, and Ben Wattenberg, the syndicated columnist and moderator of the weekly public television program "Think Tank."

In many ways the experience for the freshmen was like a Marine boot camp - they were being ripped apart from the outset by tough-talking drill instructors, but left with the notion that they are invincible.

"You haven't gone too far - we've barely done anything yet," Bennett said in the keynote speech Thursday night. "You've just started this thing. They will talk about how harsh you are and how mean you are, and you've just got to hold your ground."

With Democrats holding their own in the Senate and Clinton proving wilier than the Republicans had anticipated, the heady times they enjoyed in the first 100 days of the 104th Congress, when they began to enact their Contract with America, has given way to near gloom during the budget battle.

"A lot of people came in with unrealistic expectations on what could be accomplished," said Rep. Phil English, a freshman from Pennsylvania.

The sponsors billed the event as an opportunity for the Republican underclassmen to get away as a group from the rarefied political air of nearby Washington to exchange ideas and reset their agenda.