WASHINGTON -- If there is a single issue with the potential to define the new relationship between President Clinton and the Republican majority in Congress, it is welfare reform. It could be revealing.
Clinton used the welfare issue to define himself as a "new Democrat" -- as opposed to another liberal in the tradition of Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis -- to win the presidency in 1992. Working-class Democrats approved when he talked about ending welfare as we know it" and requiring "responsibility" on the part of recipients.
The issue helped Clinton establish himself with conservative Democrats in early primaries, and his campaign continued to exploit it through the general election campaign with TV commercials.
The president has yet to put forward the details of his proposal, but he has suggested consistently that those who receive welfare payments should be limited to two years and then obliged to work after being given training. Just where all the jobs would be found has never been entirely clear, but politically the idea of making welfare "a second chance rather than a way of life" has enormous appeal to taxpayers.
Although welfare costs constitute less than 2 percent of the federal budget, the program is perceived by many voters as the quintessential example of softheaded liberal bureaucrats spending their money on the undeserving poor. Thus, the reform of the system is an issue the Clinton White House had hoped could be used to re-establish his nonliberal bona fides in the second two years of his term.
But the newly ascendant Republicans in Congress, and particularly in the House, are talking about far more draconian legislation. The presumptive new speaker, Newt Gingrich, has suggested two years is entirely too long and talked about denying benefits for multiple out-of-wedlock births and about such radical steps as building more orphanages and relying on private charities to provide help for children now supported by welfare programs.
Some of this sounds so far-fetched that it would be expected to encounter considerable resistance from Republican moderates in the Senate and, perhaps to a lesser extent, in the House. Sen. Nancy Kassebaum of Kansas, for example, has a plan for returning the entire welfare program to the states and providing the funding by taking over all the costs of Medicaid, the medical care program for the indigent.
But even if the Republican legislation does not go to Gingrichesque extremes, it is likely to be far tougher than anything that comes from the White House.
And Clinton can expect a serious problem holding together a substantial bloc of Democratic votes for his own alternative. There are perhaps 100 liberals in the House, including most members of the Congressional Black Caucus, and a substantial bloc in the Senate who are dubious about the whole welfare reform issue because they see it as a reflection of racism.
To a degree, at least, they are right. Although no one has accused Clinton of a racial motive in advocating welfare reform, there is no doubt that much of the popular demand for action comes from conservative whites who resent what they see as huge numbers of blacks living off their tax money for one generation after another.
Indeed, it is probably fair to say that many voters see the welfare program as the ultimate proof of the failure of liberal prescriptions to solve long-standing social problems. And they are just the voters -- the ones who used to be called "Reagan Democrats" -- whose support was critical for Clinton two years ago and who last week turned angrily against the Democratic Party.
The president's balancing act on welfare also has a political component that goes beyond any one segment of the electorate, however. Given the shattering results of the 1994 election, Clinton will be under enormous pressure to demonstrate strength and purpose as the national leader seeking a second term in 1996.
So the question may be whether he can make a persuasive case for a sensible and workable welfare reform that can get through Congress or, alternatively, whether he may not be too ready to accommodate the Republicans and Democratic conservatives who agree with them.
The issue is a tricky one, but as the president himself has pointed out repeatedly, he signed on for the job voluntarily. And nobody ever told him it was going to be easy.