GOP CONGRESS GOT GOOD START ON PARING GOVERNMENT : A FOR ALL THEIR MISSTEPS AND OVERREACHING, THE REPUBLICANS WON THE LEGISLATIVE WAR, WHILE THE DEMOCRATS MAY BE WINNING THE POLITICAL ONE.

Byline: John Kolbe

THAT gasp you heard this week was an entire nation collectively starting to breathe again. Congress is finally going home.

And just in the nick of time.

Not that you'd know it from the rhetoric emanating from the presidential campaign stump, but the first Republican Congress in 40 years was quite successful, considering history and the normal immobility of this lumbering behemoth.

But that record was in danger of getting buried in the session's closing days by a much-chastened GOP majority eager to get out of town and campaign. Lest Bill Clinton booby-trap them again by vetoing agency outlays and blaming them for the resulting federal shutdown, they surrendered to nearly any whim for more bucks from the same president who pronounced big government dead.

In the process, they ceded everything from a job-killing minimum wage hike to rate-increasing insurance mandates to $6.5 billion in added spending for essentials like aid to Alaskan bear hunters and chiropractic schools.

The result, said the Wall Street Journal, was ``a warning to voters of what the 105th Congress will be like if Democrats regain their majorities.''

Smiling at the supine GOP performance, even Senate Democratic boss Tom Daschle called them ``extremely cooperative,'' not exactly the sort of praise that warms the cockles of a partisan Republican heart.

It was enough to make one misty-eyed for the good old days of ``gridlock.''

Yet, the bottom line has been obscured by the political rhetoric. For all their missteps and overreaching, the Republicans won the legislative war, while the Democrats, with more than a little help from an 89 percent pro-Clinton Washington press corps, may be winning the political one.

The list is fairly impressive:

Welfare reform. If nothing else, this shift of authority to the states - twice vetoed by Clinton before election year politics dictated a signature - shattered the irrefutable maxim that all federal entitlements are forever.

Budget cutting. Republicans chopped Clinton's budget requests for non-entitlement spending - which contained $200 million deficits indefinitely into the next century - by $58 billion in two years, resulting in less actual dollars (not just slower growth) for the first time in over four decades.

Immigration. A modest start on limiting benefits to illegal aliens.

Agricultural subsidies. Another entitlement goes kaput. In seven years, most crops will be off the dole (but not sugar or Jimmy Carter's peanuts), barring cold feet or big Democratic majorities.

Health care. Insurance portability between jobs, and a chance for taxpayers to control their own care through medical savings accounts.

Telecommunications reform. Competition comes to local phone service.

Line-item veto. A huge power shift between branches, installing accountability for spending squarely in the White House.

``The most important aspect of this Congress,'' said Sen. John McCain, is less in the legislation that was passed than in ``the seismic shift in the debate. We went from how much more in taxes to how much less. Republicans used be like the Democrats, only they'd spend a little less. Now, Democrats are like Republicans, except they want to cut less.''

Indeed, there's no better measure of the GOP's impact on the political conversation than Clinton's convention acceptance speech in August.

He claimed credit for an end to unfunded mandates on states and cities, smaller deficits, welfare reform, lower small-business taxes, a Congress that lives under its own laws and the line-item veto.

All were parts of the Contract with America that Clinton finds so ``extreme,'' and kept from enactment for decades by congressional Democrats.

Moreover, he called for a litany of proposals with distinctly Republican pedigree - increased parental choice of schools (but not vouchers), limited capital gains cuts (but not for investment in new jobs), urban empowerment zones, expanded IRAs, victims' rights and more funding for the drug czar (after cutting it over 70 percent).

And rhetoric aside, the 104th's biggest impact may be mostly overlooked deep in the federal bureaucracy.

``Its true effect may be far wider than its thin legal trail,'' reported the respected ``Congressional Quarterly'' last month. ``Even in areas where legislation failed miserably, Republicans in Congress drove White House policymakers in directions they would not have gone otherwise.''

For example, a Department of Energy that Republicans wanted to kill suddenly offered $10.5 billion of its own budget cuts. Clinton's advocacy of a BTU energy tax turned into an offer to repeal his own 4.3-cent gas levy.

Under congressional pressure for abolition, HUD suddenly merged 20 programs into three, shut down 37 others and cut employment by 1,200.

After zapping GOP plans for a missile defense, the White House agreed to consider it, and added nearly $75 billion to Pentagon budgets to mollify Congress.

There were ample failures, of course. Term limits, a balanced budget amendment, grand plans to abolish major agencies and tort reform all remain undone, as do critical changes needed to rescue Medicare from bankruptcy, a victim of relentless Democratic demagoguery.

Republicans may have won the legislative fight, but unless they can make that case on the hustings, they could lose the political one that counts next month.

In which case, Democrats would get stuck with the politically deadly task of fixing Medicare in an atmosphere they've thoroughly poisoned with their own scaremongering rhetoric.

Which would be a bit of poetic justice.

MEMO: John Kolbe is The Phoenix Gazette's political columnist.