DURING THIS YEAR'S election campaign, House Republicans spent a great deal of time focusing on such juicy targets as crime, congressional corruption, middle-class worries and the many failings of the Clinton administration.
But to hear Newt Gingrich and some of his sidekicks talk now, the election was actually a referendum on demolishing the welfare system and finally putting those shiftless poor people to work.
Nothing is easier to denounce than the current welfare system, which everyone acknowledges has serious problems but few people even begin to understand.
And as Newt Gingrich has demonstrated so ably in recent days, a story line can be constructed that blames anti-poverty programs for virtually every evil known to man.
But Newt Gingrich and the hard-right conservatives he is now installing in House leadership positions are still looking at welfare from the perspective of a legislative minority that is free to simply wail about problems.
As Kansas Sen. Bob Dole has gently reminded Newt Gingrich, a party that has control of both houses of Congress will soon be expected to actually solve some of those problems.
Newt Gingrich talks as though nothing could be easier than fixing the welfare system -- and saving enough money in the process, apparently, to clear the way for tax cuts, higher defense spending and a balanced federal budget.
But in fact few projects promise to be more difficult for the GOP than welfare reform. Three big problems spring to mind:
The deliberately tangled welfare proposals that Newt Gingricburied in the fine print of his Contract with America hardly give him the mandate that he now claims.
Newt Gingrich doesn't even have a consensus among HousRepublicans about how to proceed on welfare reform.
Take Rep. Jan Meyers of Kansas. She signed the House GOP's contract. But Ms. Meyers, who has pushed a less drastic welfare proposal in the past two years, advised Newt Gingrich against the brutal agenda he eventually outlined.
In an interview last week, Ms. Meyers said she would not vote for those proposals. She said "quite a few" of her House GOP colleagues shared her concerns, noting that some Republicans even thought her plan was too tough on the poor.
The concerns of moderate Republicans have grown since Newt Gingrich, after the election, began bubbling on national television about throwing people off welfare after only a couple of months.
Many people are laboring under some fundamental misconceptions about the impact that welfare spending has on the federal budget.
The largest welfare program, food stamps, cost a little under $24 billion in 1993. The second largest, Aid to Families with Dependent Children, or AFDC, costs $15 billion.
That's a lot of money, but it's far less than what many other government programs cost. It amounts to only a small fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars a year spent on Social Security and Medicare.
Last year's federal deficit was $203 billion. Newt Gingrich could abolish both food stamps and AFDC, and he would still be a long, long way from a balanced budget.
With research assistance from the Heritage Foundation, some wild-eyed "reformers" like Rep. Jim Talent of Missouri have exaggerated the size of the welfare budget by including dozens of other programs: education aid, economic assistance for some communities, job training, etc.
Job training really gives away the game.
The big argument for throwing poor people off welfare is that this will force them either to find jobs or -- Step No. 1 in many cases -- to get job training.
But if they get job training, according to the Heritage Foundation, they are back on "welfare" -- and part of the problem again.
Partly as a result of such contradictions in logic, some Washington Republicans have a big credibility problem in the compassion department.
Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Talent, Sen. Phil Gramm and others recently have appeared on television to lament the terrible wrong that is done to the poor by giving them assistance. They said it would be a kindness to cut them off.
"We're doing it because we "love the people on welfare," MrGramm explained, adopting the demeanor of a dog lover faced with an aging hound.
But what are people to do if they cannot find a job or if they arefor a variety of reasons, unable to work?
Confronted with this obvious question on a talk show, Newt Gingrich did not appear to have given the matter much thought.
Poor people, he said, would have to "do something."
When pressed, he repeated this sage advice. Eventually he said would like the Salvation Army to take care of the poor.
It is not clear why Newt Gingrich thinks government assistance creates a "dependency mentality" while private assistance does not. But in any case, it is common knowledge that the Salvation Army and other charities are unable to meet all the demands they face now.
Even Republicans like Mr. Meyers seem to doubt some of her colleagues' professed concern for the poor.
"If you are really thinking about people's welfare, I'm not sure you want to move that far, that fast . . . ," she said. "We're talking about people's lives."
Many of the lives in question are the lives of children. Yet even after House Republicans have cut the welfare rolls, they are still talking about not providing assistance programs with as much money as they would need.
Everyone wants a more effective welfare system.
But before people like Newt Gingrich really get down to work next January, they might want to take in a performance of "The Christmas Carol."
Stephen Winn is deputy editorial page editor of the Kansas City Star.