DOLE TO CASH IN GINGRICH CHIT -- VERY CAREFULLY.

Byline: Michael Wines The New York Times

When Newt Gingrich needed him last year, Bob Dole gulped down whatever doubts he harbored about the "Contract with America" and dutifully signed on to the House speaker's Republican revolution.

Now Dole, the presumptive Republican nominee for president, has a chit to cash in. It will be interesting to see how he spends it.

Dole is edging off the stump and back to Washington, planning a burst of legislation that will define his campaign and, aides hope, force President Clinton into some political Hobson's choices.

"There's no doubt that there is now a legislative strategy to get things passed through the Congress and onto the president's desk," Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said in an interview in the past week. "If the president doesn't sign them, it's not Bob Dole's fault. It's the president's."

Gingrich is not merely a key to that strategy but a potential stumbling block as well. On one hand, he will have to be on the front lines if his chamber's rebellious right wing is to fall in line behind Dole's agenda.

But on the other, Gingrich has acquired a public image, rightly or not, as a right-wing rebel himself. Polls show he is roughly as popular as President Nixon was in the summer of his impeachment. His "Contract with America" has lost its political cachet. And Democrats would like nothing more than to lash him to Dole as the general election campaign heats up.

Dole's challenge - and for that matter, Gingrich's - will be to employ the speaker's assets without resurrecting his liabilities.

"The most powerful message Clinton has is, 'I will protect you from the radical right,' " said Eddie Mahe, the veteran Republican political consultant. "Bob Dole has to make sure he does not provide Bill Clinton any extra ammunition to make that case."

To do so, Mahe said, "he's got to demonstrate that it's a partnership between him and Newt, but that he's senior partner. And whenever he makes a decision, the junior partner accepts and executes that decision."

Perhaps belying his public image, Gingrich is plunging into that role. His spokesman, Tony Blankley, said the speaker already has turned many of his more visible legislative duties over to the House majority leader, Dick Armey of Texas. Gingrich will spend the bulk of the year campaigning for House members and helping Dole concoct legislative strategy, he said.

Blankley said House aides already are eyeing some 40 pieces of legislation for action, each of them "completely part of what Dole's agenda is going to be." Ultimately, he said, the objective is a seamless national campaign, from the White House to the statehouses, built around Dole's agenda.

And what is that agenda?

"That's the $64,000 question," said one of Gingrich's top lieutenants, Rep. John Boehner of Ohio.

Actually, some Republicans say Dole already has begun to assert both his agenda and his pre-eminence.

At Dole's behest, House and Senate negotiators agreed Thursday on a compromise bill giving the president a line-item veto over individual items in spending bills, something that Republicans had supported in principle but that their appropriations committees had blocked in practice until now.

Dole supports another new agreement to move legislation curbing lawsuits for injuries from defective products and other causes. He favors another proposal to raise or repeal limits on the amount retirees can earn without losing Social Security benefits, and at least a token tax cut for middle-income families.

For Dole's sake, the Senate is likely to take another look at limiting the terms of federal legislators and another swipe at approving a balanced-budget amendment. Both are doomed, but both have support from the grassroots and Dole, and both are adamantly opposed by Clinton.

Dole and his strategists have not decided whether to send Clinton another bill overhauling the welfare system, in part because the president already has vetoed one attempt, thereby handing Republicans a weapon for the fall campaign.

Most of those initiatives enjoy support in the House. Indeed, much of it consists of "Contract with America" proposals that stalled, often through Republican fractiousness, last year. But Dole and Gingrich also need to take some of the hard-right edge off the Republican image, and here the going could be tougher.

Some see an early test in this week's decision by the Senate's Republicans to add $2.7 billion in education and job-training money to a fiscal 1996 spending bill. The action blunts White House assertions that Republicans want to gut popular education programs. Dole voted for it himself.

The question now is whether the House, normally a hotbed of budget-cutters, follows its presidential candidate or its own tight-fisted instincts.

"You've got something coming to the House that Dole voted for in the Senate," one Republican Party official said during the past week. "What are these guys going to do? They're going to vote for it."

All this is something of a reversal of the natural Republican order of the past year. Since Republicans came to power 14 months ago, Gingrich and his new majority have generally proposed the conservative right's social and spending line, and Dole's Senate has disposed of them, sometimes literally.

POLITICAL UPDATE The candidates

Pat Buchanan: Met with members of the United Auto Workers union in Lapeer, Mich., in an attempt to gain union support for his campaign. "We're going to try to break through and get some of the union folks," said Buchanan. "Clinton and Dole are identical. There's not a dime's worth of difference between them." A combination of social conservatives and blue-collar workers nervous about their jobs gives Buchanan significant backing in the industrial Midwest, though few expect it to be broad enough to win any of the four primaries in the region next week.

Bob Dole: Was eager to get off the campaign trail and back in the Senate to work on a balanced-budget plan. "This is not a game," Dole said during a tour of a Honda plant in East Liberty, Ohio. "We're prepared to do it now even though it's an election cycle. A lot of time will be left until November as far as politics is concerned." Dole has no plans to give up his job as Senate majority leader. "It's just something I do fairly well," he told reporters. For one thing, he is all but out of campaign funds and does not plan much campaign travel after the March 26 California primary.

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