BUDGET, MEET THY MAKER

By KAREN TUMULTY WASHINGTON PHOTOGRAPHS FOR TIME BY P.F. BENTLEY

What was a radical to do? For weeks, House G.O.P. freshman Sam Brownback of Kansas had been trying to find someone with seniority who would listen to the ideas that he and other new lawmakers had for going beyond the ``Contract with America.'' And for weeks, he had got the same perfunctory responses: ``Maybe later, after things settle down a bit''; ``Maybe after you've been around a bit longer''; ``Maybe Maybe Maybe '' Then Brownback got a phone call from Budget Committee chairman John Kasich. Said Kasich: ``Okay, you want to start a revolution? We'll start a revolution.''

Brownback, the freshman-class president, hastily rounded up as many of his fellow newcomers as he could find and trooped over to Kasich's office. There they learned that their radical ideas were not quite as radical as the chairman's. Not only had Kasich thought of many of them himself, but he wanted to up the bidding. So, the freshmen wanted to eliminate three Cabinet departments? Why not four? How about adding the Commerce Department, that gigantic bureaucracy whose main use has been to dispense patronage jobs and favors for campaign contributors?

In the incoming crop of House members, Brownback said, Kasich found ``a chorus of angels singing to his soul.'' And last week, as the freshmen unveiled their plan to dismantle the Commerce, Education, Energy and Housing departments, Kasich stood with them. ``This is serious! This is real! And I love 'em all!'' the chairman crowed.

Then again, Kasich needs all the friends he can get these days. As Budget Committee chairman, he is charged with pulling off a trillion-dollar feat: wiping out the deficit by 2002, while lowering middle-class taxes by better than $100 billion. Moreover, it all has to be done without cutting defense, touching Social Security or raising taxes. Kasich has the advantages of the single-minded and the weaknesses of the true believer. He has proved that he is willing to march ahead; whether he can convince enough people to follow him is another question. As he makes his plans clearer, the grousing is getting louder, with some of the bitterest complaints coming from fellow committee chairmen. Snapped one Republican: ``He wants to be secretary of everything.''

Understandably, the White House is offering no help or cover in the struggle that the Republicans have taken on by putting forth such contradictory goals in their Contract. Clinton sent Congress a budget with a scant $80 billion deficit reduction over the next five years, a gesture that told the Republicans they were on their own. Kasich, Clinton Budget Director Alice Rivlin told TIME, ``has got a huge job. The Republicans have undertaken an enormously difficult task.'' Yet the six-term Ohio Congressman seems to feel it is his responsibility, if not his destiny. ``We have an obligation to leave the planet better off than we found it. If we pile on debt, are we going to be able to look our kids in the eye and say we failed to tackle it?'' he told TIME. ``If you're going to fail, you better have tried.''

In many ways, the hyperkinetic Kasich--whose name, he points out, rhymes with basic--is the perfect general for this most crucial campaign of the Gingrich Revolution. At 42, the youngest committee chairman on Capitol Hill embodies both the brashness and the energy of the new generation of conservatives. Kasich may be the only Congressman ever evicted from the stage at a Grateful Dead concert. (A misunderstanding, he says of the 1991 dustup at Washington's R.F.K. Stadium: he had been invited onstage by his friend, country star Dwight Yoakam, the Dead's warm-up act.) He has also been known to break up the monotony of long flights by unfolding his six-foot frame in the aisle and doing push-ups.

With his dark suits and wing tips, Kasich evokes Chamber of Commerce orthodoxy--or he would if he ever managed to run a comb through his bowl-cut hair, which makes him look like an unruly teenager. He also has a penchant for the goofy. One Budget Committee brainstorming session opened to the strains of Wooly Bully punctuated by a Nerf gunfight between Budget staff members and lobbyists. He will wave a toy hatchet at an interviewer one moment and say earnestly the next: ``I want you to believe this, too, that intellectually what we're talking about is right.''

With his zeal for doing the unpopular, Kasich takes much of the political heat off Gingrich. At the same time, however, he risks finding himself the fall guy if things go badly. He conceded as much at a hearing this month when he publicly commiserated with Rivlin, who lost internal battles at the White House over whether the Administration should opt for further deficit reduction. ``I hope you'll be the only one in this city that will lose this fight this year,'' Kasich told Rivlin. ``But you know what? I've got a feeling that there will be some others of us that will lose some fights along the way that will break our hearts like this fight, I believe, broke your heart.''

The son of a mailman from the blue-collar town of McKees Rocks, Pennsylvania, Kasich, in an act of college rebellion upon reaching Ohio State University, rejected his Democratic roots in favor of the populist, antibureaucratic doctrine. But whatever complaints he may have about government, he nonetheless has spent his entire career on the public payroll. (``I'm going to end up in the private sector,'' he vows. ``At some point, I'm out of this.'') His first job after graduating from college in 1974 was as an aide in the state senate, and within four years he had won a seat there. In 1982 he beat a weak incumbent in eastern Columbus and entered Congress--the only Republican to beat a Democrat that recession-racked year.

Kasich devotes what free time he has to the weight machines and stair climbers in the House gym. Even there, however, he is working; the gym is where Kasich has cemented many important friendships, including that of Leon Panetta, the White House chief of staff. Divorced and childless, he refuses to discuss his private life--save one element of it, his religious faith, which deepened after his parents were killed by a drunk driver in 1987. ``My parents did not die in vain,'' he said. ``I think I saved my soul and preserved my eternal destiny.'' Kasich was raised a Catholic and now refers to himself simply as a Christian. He attends a variety of churches and most Thursday afternoons joins a Christian study group that meets in the family quarters just outside the House chamber.

Despite his admitted supply-side leanings, Kasich comes to his new job with extraordinary credibility as a deficit fighter. In 1990, discouraged by the deficit and Bush's budget, he and two aides cobbled together a proposal based on the idea of freezing most federal spending. But all he could muster on the House floor were 30 votes, mostly from congressional nobodies like himself. Still, the cocky young Ohio Congressman kept at it, and within two years his budget was getting more votes in the House than Bush's. By 1993, the proposal that he and like-minded Democrat Tim Penny had put together came within six votes of passing and torpedoing Clinton's entire economic program.

His earlier budgets contained such incendiary measures as adding a means test to the part of the Medicare program that pays for visits to the doctor. Kasich also was willing to forge unlikely alliances in the interest of deficit reduction--most notably in the successful campaign he waged with California's Ron Dellums, one of the House's most ardent liberals, to curb production of the B-2 bomber.

He also seems willing to butt heads with his own party. Nowhere is the battle between him and other powerful Republicans likely to be as fierce as over defense. Kasich, who likes to call himself a ``cheap hawk,'' is certain to resist the plans that other G.O.P. leaders are making for dramatic increases in defense spending. ``There's so much waste and inefficiency in the operation of the Pentagon,'' he said. ``We need to clean that up as much as we need to clean up any other department. Even the guys with stars on their shoulders will tell you that.'' In a vote last week, Kasich was one of two dozen G.O.P. lawmakers who broke rank and opposed moving ahead to deploy the costly version of the Star Wars antimissile defense system that had been called for in the Contract with America. In so doing, he helped hand House Democrats their first victory since Republicans took control. Later, Kasich said he had misunderstood the vote--an explanation that did not wash with many of his critics. The past few weeks have also seen Kasich engaged in monumental behind-the-scenes turf battles with the fierce Republicans who run the mighty Appropriations Committee.

In these struggles and others, Kasich can count on Gingrich to be on his side, at least up to a point. When they were still in the minority, Gingrich was a crucial ally in Kasich's bid to vault over more senior Republicans for the top spot on the Budget Committee. Similarly, Gingrich protected Kasich when he voted last summer for Clinton's crime bill--an act of party betrayal that might have cost him his chairmanship. Many are still rankled because Kasich not only supported the bill but lectured fellow Republicans on the virtues of ``coming toward the middle to serve our country.''

While colleagues respect his commitment and his expertise, Kasich's truncheon-like style has proved to be a problem when it comes to more delicate aspects of his job. Some Republicans grumble that the chairman is well on his way to becoming the most unpopular member of the House. Then again, says G.O.P. consultant Paul Wilson, ``he doesn't really care who likes him. He'll take on anybody. He's like the kid from the neighborhood who picks a fight to show the bigger boys he can beat 'em.'' Kasich insists that his first month as chairman has made him a bit wiser. ``I've learned a lot about people,'' he said. ``I've learned that you have to slow down a bit and that you have to take an extra breath.'' And then take out the knives.

--With reporting by Michael Duffy and Suneel Ratan/Washington

-QUOTE- "He'll take on anybody. He's like the neighborhood kid who picks a fight to show the bigger boys he can beat 'em."

With reporting by MICHAEL DUFFY AND SUNEEL RATAN/WASHINGTON