NEWT GINGRICH USED TO DREAM last spring about the day when he would get to sit down and play a kind of Russian roulette with the President. The stakes would be very high. The whole government would be held hostage while the country waited to see who would blink. The House Speaker would confront Bill Clinton with a choice: Sign a historic balanced-budget plan on Republican terms or watch the government shut down. ''Which of the two of us do you think cares more about the government not showing up?" Gingrich asked. ''Him or me?''
Last Thursday night, exactly one year since his triumphant ascent to the Speaker's chair, Gingrich stood before his troops at a private session in the Cannon caucus room. He had told them then that there would come a dark hour, when the fight would grow hard, the polls pitiless, the prospects bleak. And he had promised he would be right at their side, that once they had won the war, all the pain would be forgotten.
He got almost everything right. As he foretold, the public hated the Republican blackmail strategy. But even more ominous, he saw that his coalition was beginning to splinter. On Wednesday morning he had taken a secret ballot of his members on whether to reopen the government. By 111 to 54 they had voted no. But those 54 votes told Gingrich that he was losing control of the House and would have to give up his best weapon in the budget war. And so, with eyes downcast and voice resolute, he recalled his own childhood as an Army brat, remembering what it was like to live in a family that always seemed to be stretching toward its next paycheck. And then came the clincher: ''It is morally wrong and indefensible not to pay federal workers. I don't care what the rest of you think; I am going to get something on the floor in the next couple of days.'' By late the next evening, the U.S. government was back in business, and the Speaker was the one who had blinked.
No matter what the final outcome, this was a bad week for Gingrich. He exposed just how quickly the House that he had mastered could slip away from him. He handed the White House an enormous public relations win, while losing his leverage in the battle. He elevated his G.O.P. rival Bob Dole, who double-crossed Gingrich by boldly declaring that the shutdown wasn't working and by separating himself and his chamber from the House of ill repute.
The more liberal White House aides ended the week in rapture. Not only had they won this skirmish, but the disarray in the G.O.P. ranks made it less likely that there would ever be a balanced-budget deal, which would suit them just fine. In negotiations over the weekend, Clinton tried to placate Republicans by saying he would support a seven-year balanced budget put forward by Senate minority leader Tom Daschle. But one senior Clinton aide admitted that endorsing the plan was just "a p.r. game." Thus while the mere melodramas of locked doors, halted passports and shuttered museums came to a close, the truly historic question of breaking the debt addiction was in danger of receding, out of relief and exhaustion and confusion, as if everyone knew that if the two sides couldn't solve this little matter of paychecks, the bigger issues were past the point of rescue.