U.S. Congress -- The Good, The Bad And The Mealy-Mouthed -- Are The Media Unfair? Are Lawmakers Overpaid? Our Speaker Speaks . . .

WASHINGTON - Congress is so much better than we think - and, at the same time, so much worse - that it stands as the grand paradox of American political institutions in this era. Both the positive and the negative sides came into focus last week in an interview with House Speaker Thomas S. Foley (D-Wash.).

We began by talking about the record of the much-reviled 101st Congress, which Foley said was far better than the press or the public recognized. He is not alone in that judgment.

In separate letters, two veteran legislators for whom I have great respect, Chairman Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.) of the House Ways and Means Committee and Rep. David R. Obey (D-Wis.), No. 5 ranking member of the Appropriations Committee, said this past Congress probably had accomplished more than any previous Congress in which they had served.

That may sound like bragging or like defensiveness. But this is what Congressional Quarterly, the independent publication that is the authority on the legislative branch, said in its end-of-session review last month: ``It is hard to say what is more remarkable about the 101st Congress: that lawmakers accomplished so much or that they looked so bad doing it.''

The accomplishments include the famous multi-year budget deal, which was so long in coming. It still leaves unacceptably large deficits. But it made the first round of tough decisions and put in place an enforcement mechanism that will compel Congress to make the further hard choices required to get the government on a pay-as-you-go basis.

Beyond that, the last Congress wrote the most important piece of environmental legislation since the '70s - the updating of the Clean Air Act. It also enacted the first national child-care policy and program ever passed, a significant expansion of both Head Start and Medicaid coverage for needy youths, the first housing legislation in 16 years, a major program to improve airport facilities and reduce noise, a sensible and less costly farm program and a major overhaul of immigration laws.

WHEN I asked Foley why he thought Congress had done so much and yet received little but abuse and derision, he turned the question back on me - and on the press.

When it comes to Congress, he said, ``the press can handle only one story at a time. As far as the press was concerned, ``Congress was either entirely involved with the pay raise, or the Jim Wright case, or the budget.

And even the one thing the press says Congress is doing gets boiled down to a two-word phrase: It was always the `budget mess,' the `budget fiasco,' the `budget agony,' the `budget imbroglio,' the `budget disaster.' The public got the impression the mechanics they had hired to fix the car

couldn't even figure out how to get the hood open.

``In the end,'' he said, ``the budget process was a substantial success. But it failed to produce the quick theatrical denouement somebody must have expected. And when the deal was finally struck, the press was committed to its version of the story, so you had stories that began: `Heading home to face the righteous anger of their constituents, the members of the sorry 101st Congress snuck out of Washington . . .' ''

All this was said with good-humored exaggeration. And yet there is enough truth in Foley's comments to prick the conscience of any Washington journalist. In fact, we rarely do justice to the wide variety of legislative issues Congress is tackling in its scores of committees

on any given day. And even when a major bill reaches the floor, it is not often that the public learns much about those who have crafted the measure.

For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act passed by the 101st Congress was arguably the most significant civil-rights and social-policy legislation to become law in more than a decade.

But when President Bush invited the lawmakers who had contributed to its passage to join him in the Rose Garden for the bill-signing ceremony, it is doubtful that more than a handful of reporters in Washington - let alone the voters - knew the names of the people in the picture with the President.

Congress suffers in its coverage because the legislative process is so protracted. Often, when consensus is finally achieved, the story lacks the element of personal conflict reporters love.

But those are excuses - not justifications. The press has to do a better job of spotlighting what Congress does. Legislators who do as much for the country as those who shaped the major laws of the 101st Congress deserve recognition.

And there's a second reason to keep the spotlight more focused on Congress. Only the glare of press and public scrutiny will force its leaders and members to stop the debasement of democracy by campaign cash that they now tolerate and from which they benefit. Talking with Foley made me realize, more than before, that it will take shock therapy to force Congress to change that campaign-finance system.

If you ask Foley what he thinks about the growing national movement to limit the length of time anyone may serve in legislative office, he seems remarkably unconcerned.

``It has a natural appeal,'' he told me dismissingly, ``but I don't believe that even in 2020 there will be term limitations on Congress.''

The ``they-can't-touch-us'' attitude implicit in Foley's response is all too characteristic of incumbents in Congress, who have come to believe that nothing can disturb their comfortable occupancy of their jobs.

Foley obviously knows that Congress is held in low esteem. ``The level of hostility is pretty high,'' he said. ``I concede that.'' But even Tom Foley, as fair-minded a man as you can find among the leaders of the House, cannot bring himself to see that after 36 consecutive years of Democratic control of that body, time has run out on temporizing.

Unless the Democrats rewrite the campaign-finance laws to allow genuinely broad and fair competition for House seats, instead of the incumbent-rigged elections of recent years, with their 96 percent re-election rates, public frustration will overflow into the kind of irrational, punitive measure term-limits represent.

In his first year as Speaker, Foley allowed the members of the Democratic caucus who oppose any change in the cushy status quo to delay committee approval of a campaign-finance bill until Aug. 3 of election year 1990.

He then delayed until Sept. 26 naming conferees to reconcile the House version of the bill with the very different measure the Senate had passed. Net result: The conferees never met and no bill came out of Congress.

It was a sham, the kind of thing that makes people justifiably cynical about the way Congress operates. Foley tolerated it in the last Congress, and the interview left me wondering if he has the stomach to do anything more in the next two years.

I say that despite the fact that Foley's record demonstrates his own receptivity to campaign-finance reform. Years ago, he sponsored a bill to provide public financing of congressional campaigns. He continues to support that proposal, even knowing that President Bush has threatened to veto such a plan and that populist demagogues could easily stir taxpayer resentment against ``those politicians forcing you to pay for their campaigns.''

But public financing is only one of several ways to reduce the overwhelming financial advantage incumbents now enjoy. No one should underestimate the difficulty of designing a system that will enhance competition, be fair to both parties and satisfy the constitutional tests imposed by the Supreme Court.

BUT the very difficulty of the challenge demands that the leader of the House step up to it personally - and that, Foley has not done. He has not made it his own priority, as Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D

Maine) has done.

Nor has he done what House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) did last year - holding caucus after caucus of House Republicans until there was consensus on a substantive reform agenda. Indeed, Foley has not responded enthusiastically to Michel's repeated offers for the

leaders of both parties to attempt to negotiate a bipartisan proposal.

AFTER hearing him the other day, I am unconvinced Foley yet is ready to grasp the nettle. He spent far more time explaining and rationalizing the resistance to reform than he did in suggesting ways to overcome the obvious self-interest of incumbents in preserving a system which serves their own hunger for re-election so ruthlessly well.

``Inside the institution,'' Foley said, ``there's a sense of puzzlement at all the talk that incumbents have a lock. . . . The members feel they are targets of a conspiracy, using slick ad techniques and misinformation, to remove them from office, no matter how hard they have worked. . . . Internally, attitudes are almost a mirror image of those on the outside. There's a very great feeling that any kind of reform will be unfair to incumbents.''

I don't doubt that he describes the attitudes correctly. But repeating them only dignifies their underlying paranoia. The reality is that only 35 House incumbents had challengers with even half their campaign funds, and more than half the House members either had no opponent or one with less than $25,000 to spend. Some conspiracy.

It was only after a long disquisition on the resistance to change that Foley said, ``We're going to try again - early in the cycle.'' Pressed to be more specific, he said: ``I'll try to get a bill out of committee in the spring, I guess.'' In the next breath, he conceded: ``Some days I wish it (the campaign-finance issue) would go away - sure.''

That kind of reluctant leadership won't get the job done. As long as it is all that Foley offers, then he is part of the problem - not part of the solution. He is not the only problem: Bush has been obdurate on the issue in his own way.

But Foley speaks for the people who benefit most from the present system that strangles electoral competition. He cannot be allowed to duck his responsibility to change the voters' perception that politics is a cynically self-serving game.