Congress:Confidence Game.

The temptation for conservatives will be to attack the budget resolution written by John Kasich and just passed by congressional Republicans. There is much to criticize: Congress did not identify a single program to be terminated; it made a vague promise of $800 billion in tax cuts over ten years, with most of the cuts coming late in that period. Republicans persist in the delusion that they can impress voters by outspending the president on education.

The budget does, however, maintain the spending caps from the 1997 budget deal, which is more than was expected even a month ago. And to get the Republican conference on record as supporting large tax cuts, however undefined, is no small accomplishment. Taking Social Security off budget robbed the Democrats of their most effective talking point on tax cuts. New Jersey senator Frank Lautenberg, the ranking Democrat on the budget committee, was reduced to sputtering that tax cuts would prevent all the domestic-spending increases that Democrats favor. That's an argument Republicans can win.

Republicans hope that passing the budget on time, for a change, will give them an air of competence and diligence. But their most important political achievement has been to change, not their public image, but their image of themselves. As our Kate O'Beirne reports (page 28), congressional Republicans under Speaker Denny Hastert are feeling confident again after three years of confusion and retreat. Recent weeks have seen a modest victory on education- Republicans succeeded in giving states more flexibility in using federal aid-and a big win on missile defense. Democrats, meanwhile, have not found their footing in the post-Lewinsky world. Their lack of confidence in their leader, Bill Clinton, makes the Juanita Broaddrick story and the administration's lurches in the Balkans all the more demoralizing.

The Republicans' current posture is best characterized as an aggressive defense. It is well and good for them to begin their political recovery by focusing on wiping out liabilities. But they must follow through by actually passing tax cuts and controlling spending later this year. And conservatives will expect at some point to see Republicans exhibit the same cohesion and aggressiveness on offense as they have on defense. Can the party mount a coherent, conservative challenge to administration policies on everything from foreign policy to tort reform? Can it devise a politics both principled and smart, as it signally failed to do at its last high point? The answer to these questions will tell us more about Republican prospects in 2000 than the poll numbers of any presidential candidate.