He is not quite so dead in America. His approval ratings creep toward respectability. His State of the Union Message, scorned in Washington, seemed to make sense in Peoria. His failed intervention in the baseball strike, a muffed bunt in Washington, is treated with respect and gratitude in the sports pages – which are better read, sigh, than the op-eds. His desire to raise the minimum wage is popular. His Mexico bailout seems presidential. His confrontation with China over trade has produced a rare Confucian blink. But most important, he has positioned himself smartly in the coming struggle against the Republican Congress.

This last is a consequence of a surprising and decidedly un-Clintonian decision – to be passive and tactical, rather than activist and high-minded, about the budget; which, in turn, was made possible by the president’s liberation from the Democratic Congress. Legislators make lousy allies. Mitchell and Foley never didBill Clinton many favors, even though he showed them great (and almost entirely unwarranted) respect. But he doesn’t even have to pretend with the Republicans, who have overinterpreted their victory and are beginning to present a plump, egregious target. An example is the crime bill, which they have noisily vowed to toughen – but instead appear to be porkifying in ways that defy the imagination.

You remember last year’s crime bill: 100,000 cops, a prison at every highway interchange, midnight basketball. OK, imagine a Republican crime bill – twice as many cops and prisons and no midnight basketball? Sorry. The GOP does want more jails, but it’s also decided to lump the (slightly reduced) money for cops and prevention into no-strings block grants for cities, which mayors could use for basketballs, bazookas, whatever. Newt Gingrich thought this was a terrible idea last June: “If they say to me, in the name of fighting crime, will I send a $2 billion check to cities . . .to let local politicians build a bigger machine with more patronage, my answer is no.” So what changed? A high-minded, disingenuous Republican might say: devolution – we now believe in sending power out from Washington. The reality is less lofty: why let Bill Clinton take credit for 100,000 new cops? Of course, Clinton’s 100,000 isn’t exactly fat-free either. Last week he announced what might be called the Barney Fife Job Creation Act: new cops for 6,000 small towns – including one for Russell, Kans., the home of Bob Dole. To which a true conservative might respond: why should an austere federal government be in the cop-procurement business, anyway? Isn’t that a local job? Don’t these things always dissolve into cholesterol?

The gamble inherent in the president’s budget – which posits $200 billion deficits through the millennium – is that there won’t be enough true conservatives in the GOP to really take a whack at spending (or do much of anything else, including cut taxes). After all, most Republicans spent the last 15 years faking it – exhorting austerity but never actually having to impose it. The presence of taxes and absence of majority status enabled Speaker Gingrich and his allies to evade tough votes on George Bush’s 1990 deficit-reduction package, and Bill Clinton’s in 1993. “Why shouldn’t they, finally, be flushed out?” asks a Clinton aide. Why shouldn’t they be forced – as James Carville likes to say, and the president is fond of repeating – to show how they can balance the budget simply by abolishing welfare and foreign aid? There is a refreshingly un-Democratic tinge to such cynicism. The Great Mondale-Dukakis bleeding heart would hemorrhage.

There are Republicans who may call the president’s bluff, who really want to whack the deficit. Last week Sens. Bob Packwood and John Chafee sent clear signals in the Finance Committee – which buried Clinton’s health plan and may do the same for the fiscal aspects of Gingrich’s Contract – that they are not at all interested in the tax cuts proposed by either the president or assorted Republicans. But their resolve was lost in the queasy crunch of Republican knees buckling. “I met with 25 Republican congressmen last week and they were shaken,” GOP strategist William Kristol said. “They were saying, “Gee, our constituents like some of these programs. They don’t want funds for the local symphony cut’.” Kristol tried to remind them of the “expectations after the election . . . our promise to cut government.” But he had to admit, later, that the Clinton budget was “tactically very shrewd – though strategically problematic. People want leadership from a president. This is a throw-in-the-towel budget. He’s saying he can’t cut spending or raise taxes to pay for the things he wants. He’s paralyzed.”

Being paralyzed isn’t exhilarating, but it’s better than being dead. And what Kristol is implicitly admitting is significant: the president has positioned himself to prove that Republicans have been blowing smoke. They now have to show they’re willing to cut enough to eventually balance the budget (and also, perhaps, to bestow vast tax cuts on a testy nation). If they can’t, their Contract could seem as devalued come October as the president does now. This may not be great leadership, but it is plausible politics. And plausible anything from this guy seems a triumph.