PERSPECTIVE ON THE 104th CONGRESS : A Reasonable GOP Can Do a Lot : Unless they have 95% unity in the House, Republicans will need Democrats. Here’s what’s doable, to the nation’s benefit.

The first Republican House of Representatives in 40 years, the first all-GOP Congress to face a Democratic President in 48 years, a Republican Speaker named Newt Gingrich--all these dramatic changes suggest that governance will be on a different plane this year, an exceedingly difficult one.

When Gingrich said after the election that he believed in cooperation but not compromise, it underscored the seeming super-clash ahead.

But if finding ways to reconcile the priorities, styles and constituencies of the likes of Speaker Gingrich, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole and President Clinton is tough, it is not impossible. The fact is that real opportunities are there for solid governance in the 104th Congress. If the key actors consider and follow some simple principles, the next two years could turn out to be surprisingly and positively productive.

* The best politics is good governance.

In his first speech to the new majority House Republican conference, Gingrich noted that if it has been 40 years since the Republicans won the House, it has been nearly 70 years since the GOP held the House for a second consecutive term. The Republican challenge is to give voters a reason to keep them in the saddle past 1996.

For all the Republican bluster about daring vetoes and all the Democratic bravado about brandishing vetoes and using filibusters, the basic reality is that everyone inside the Beltway gains far more by demonstrating an ability to make things happen--by governing.

Bill Clinton, of course, wants to be in a position in 1996 to defend his record--and to have a solid record of accomplishment to defend. But Republicans are in a similar position. Winning majorities in Congress means that the GOP has an equal share of responsibility for governing. The blame game can work when you are on the outside looking in; it is much harder to use when you are on the inside actually running things. How do you stay on the inside? Show the voters that you can make the system work.

* Politics stops at the floor’s edge.

The 1994 election was highly partisan: Democrats lost, Republicans won. Not a single Republican incumbent was defeated for reelection to the House, the Senate or a governorship, leading to the massive GOP sweep. But if the election was partisan, the lesson is not partisanship, but governing with broad majorities.

No question, Gingrich and Dole, along with leaders like Dick Armey and Phil Gramm, would prefer to find 218 House votes and 51 Senate votes entirely on the GOP side of the aisle, allowing them to achieve their pure goals without compromises. But with rare exceptions, that is simply not a practical possibility.

In the House, there will be issues on which the GOP can hold its slender majority together. But even then, any purist legislation will not pass muster in the Senate; 51 reliably conservative Republican votes simply aren’t there, not with the likes of James M. Jeffords, Mark Hatfield, John H. Chafee, Olympia J. Snowe, William S. Cohen, Arlen Specter, Nancy Kassebaum and Bob Packwood in the ranks, And as time passes, the House Republicans’ ability to keep their troops together will diminish, especially on amendments.

The 1994 election brought another distinction: the largest minority in 40 years. If the House Republicans fall below 95% unity, they need Democratic votes; if they fall much below 90%, they cannot build a bipartisan conservative coalition, because--unlike the Reagan years--there aren’t enough Democratic “boll weevil” conservatives. And the House GOP ranks include two dozen or more natural centrists, whose inclination is to move to the middle, not huddle on the ideological edge.

To govern successfully with this dynamic more often than not will demand super-majorities in the moderate middle--275 votes, not 218, or even 230 in the House, and 58 to 60, not 51 or even 53, in the Senate, modeled along the lines of the successful coalitions that approved the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade. And those kinds of majorities can be achieved across a gamut of issues from telecommunications reform to welfare reform.

* Focus on the second hundred days.

The first hundred days of the new Congress, of course, will be spent preoccupied with the budget and the House’s “contract with America” amid a lot of partisan bickering and maneuvering. At this stage, majority partisan discipline will be at its peak. Some things, like the line-item veto and the balanced-budget amendment, are likely to pass both houses, while other measures will flounder or just make it through the House in some form. In the meantime though, in House and Senate committees, other major policy changes can get under way.

The real chance for governing will come in the second hundred days. At that point, there will be a long list of agenda items ripe for final action on a broad bipartisan basis, on the GATT model: health insurance reform, Superfund, safe drinking water, mining reform, telecommunications reform, a crime bill revision, tort and product liability reform, lobbying and gift reform, even welfare reform. There are possibilities for even more ambitious action, including a revision of the War Powers Act; a farm bill, with dramatic cutbacks in subsidies; significant moves in reinventing government, including program consolidations, block grants to states and the elimination of agencies and functions, and even a consensus package of deficit-reducing budget cuts.

Is this scenario optimistic, even Pollyanna-ish? Perhaps, but the ingredients do exist for broad agreement on all these issues, across parties and chambers and at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue. And by the second hundred days, more of the key players in the process can be persuaded that such agreement and action is in their mutual interest.

To make this process work will require isolating the bomb-throwers on both sides--see our Principle No. 2--but some deft maneuvering by the White House and mainstream congressional leaders can make that a reality.

DR, “Friar Newt, I hereby dub thee ‘Son of Reagan Hood’ who robs from the poor and gives to the rich,” CONRAD, L.A. TIMES SYNDICATE, Copyrighted.