Showdown: The Struggle Between the Gingrich Congress and the Clinton White House.

Attacking Elizabeth Drew for drowning us in irrelevant political details about an arcane process is far too easy. But that shouldn't stop anyone.

In Showdown, Drew takes us through the internal maneuvering of the budget wonks on the Hill and in the White House during the 1994-'95 budget battle. This weighty event is replete with moments (in fact, days, even weeks) of tedium. Drew spares us none of them. We witness, for example, the internal debate among House Republicans over the rewriting of sections of an appropriations rescissions bill. One memorable paragraph begins, "In the subcommittee meetings...." It reads like a full-text printout of a Nexis search for "Budget and Congress."

Only occasionally is the drama of the events thick enough to support Drew's tick-tock coverage. The Senate cliffhanger vote on the Balanced Budget Amendment is one. Drew supplements what was detailed daily press coverage with some choice bits, like Utah Senator Orren Hatch, a key amendment supporter, sending teleminister Robert Schuller to visit Oregon Senator Mark Hatfield before the vote to convince him to switch his vote to "aye." (He didn't.)

That said, Drew's points, both large and small, are on target: The budget battle was less about balancing the books than an excuse for hacking at the size and scope of federal government; the GOP made a political goof by trying to push through most of their budget reforms in one do-or-die bill; Republicans didn't have the foresight to plan an effective counter-strategy in the event of a Clinton veto; and so on. And Drew's political judgments are keen. Her up close observations bring to light the haphazard nature of the way both the policy and the politics of the budget were assembled. For example, she shows how Clinton caught even his own White House advisors off-guard when he blurted out in a New Hampshire radio interview that he would offer a 10-year balanced budget plan of his own.

It's also true that Drew, to her credit, doesn't overreach. Political analysts can't seem to resist linking congressional and presidential debacles to grander points about the failure of the System. (Occasionally, they're right.) Drew sticks to the nuts and bolts. The fact that Republicans didn't enact their balanced budget has less to do with James Madison than with Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.

Drew zeroes in on the GOP's Medicare plan as their undoing. The Democrats cashed in big by focusing attention on the fact that Republicans wanted to cut Medicare spending and cut taxes by nearly the same amount. Indeed, the Democrats had a good point. The Republicans' first set of proposed Medicare cuts were unnecessarily steep--$270 billion over seven years. Later, after Democrats pounded them on the link between the size of the Medicare cuts and the tax cuts, they offered more reasonable numbers.

Now, both the Medicare plan and large tax cuts are just about dead for the rest of this year. But the GOP is only beginning to absorb the negative political fallout from their effort to overhaul Medicare. Though Drew's story ends with the failure of the budget bill, her reporting on Medicare goes a long way toward helping explain the nasty election-year Medicare battle now taking shape. In short, Democrats are poised to a score a huge political victory but largely by distorting the facts. Will that approach come back to haunt them?

Both Republicans and Democrats are well aware that Medicare is scheduled to go broke in about 2001. And both know that the sooner Congress and the President agree on a fix, the easier it will be to avoid insolvency.

For a short period last winter, it appeared as though both sides were coming to their senses. As part of the bipartisan budget talks at the White House, both put on the table sweeping reform plans that would keep Medicare solvent until about 2010. Although the plans contained a number of key differences, they were in striking distance. Both pushed for increased use of managed care; both sought most of their savings through reduced payments to providers. Republicans wanted cuts of $168 billion over the next seven years; the White House would cut about $124 billion--not an unbridgeable gap.

That's the policy reality. But you'd never know it listening to the Democrats these days. Their message heading into the campaign is that Republicans are attempting to destroy Medicare. They blithely ignore that the President's plan is roughly parallel. To spread the word, they're getting millions of dollars worth of help from outside groups such as the AFL-CIO and the National Council of Senior Citizens. "Republicans have declared war on senior citizens," says Patrick Burns of the National Council of Senior Citizens. "We're going to be the Marine Corps--the suicide jumpers--of the debate to get that message out."

The strategy is working. Recent polls show that President Clinton scores his highest approval ratings on the issue, while Republicans score their lowest. In fact, Democrats plan to step up the attack. In coming months, they'll unleash a series of ads featuring Speaker Gingrich saying, "We believe it's going to wither on the vine." The ads assert that Gingrich is referring to Medicare. Republicans are crying foul, saying Gingrich was referring to the size of the bureaucracy that runs Medicare, not the program itself. A transcript of the somewhat rambling speech shows it's unclear to what Gingrich was referring.

Republicans, on the other hand, are taking quite a different approach to Medicare as a campaign issue. They're telling the truth--or at least as near as one could expect in the current political climate. Certainly they'll be telling their share of whoppers on any number of issues this fall, but at least on Medicare their current approach is to take their plan, cuts and all, to the constituents and try to explain it. "We're addressing it head on," says Indiana Rep. David McIntosh, a conservative Republican. "The candidates who don't educate their constituents are going to get beat on it."

It's a risky approach. They'll be telling seniors that they want to "preserve and protect" the program but that they'll spend less than they otherwise would have. Will it work? "We have to do a tremendous selling job," concedes GOP Rep. George Radanovich. But in many ways, Republicans have no choice. If they switch their position now, Democrats will savage them not only for their original proposal, but for flip-flopping as well.

So Democrats are playing politics in a political campaign. Hardly a news flash. Republicans have their own campaign demagogueries, such as calling the tax increases in Clinton's 1993 deficit reduction bill "the largest tax hike in the history of the world." But it's worth suspending cynicism (briefly) to suggest that in the case of Medicare, the price may actually be too steep. Medicare really is going broke. And the program really will need to be fixed. Voters are more likely to accept sweeping changes in a program as popular as Medicare if the political groundwork is laid beforehand. Democrats apparently aren't game. When Congress has to pass another quick fix three years from now, at least we'll know why.