U.S. House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt is a Democrat who takes both his governmental and his party responsibilities seriously. The Missourian's latest effort to frame a governing concept which the Democrats can also use as a partisan slogan is what he calls "rewards for results."

Essentially, Gephardt is suggesting that the federal government put its money only into those programs that can demonstrate their effectiveness.

At home, he has introduced a bill that offers additional federal funds to states which assure that all pre-school youngsters get adequate diets and immunization shots and to those which cut student dropout rates and boost their test scores. Internationally, he has suggested that the United States and other Western nations pledge to deliver economic aid to the Soviet republics as they take concrete steps to shift to a free economy.

In coming weeks, he plans to offer variations on the "rewards for results" theme in legislation on trade and job training that would create incentives for companies that keep jobs in the United States and reach into hard-core unemployment areas to fill them. In each instance, he would have the federal government say: Show us you're serious, and we will buy in. But we're only paying for results.

It is a simple and sweeping idea, aimed at public cynicism about the value of government and the returns on taxes. But it is open to challenge. While seemingly reducing the bureaucratic dictates on how these goals are to be achieved, it still embodies the conceit that Washington knows best what ought to be done.

Gephardt's fellow Democrats have been slow to embrace his "rewards for results" slogan as their new battle cry. And they may have good reason for caution. Suppose someone applied it to Congress itself.

A year ago, Gephardt presided over protracted budget negotiations between the White House and congressional leaders. The tortuous process produced an agreement that was supposed to stanch the flow of red ink. A year later, the fiscal 1992 budget-deficit projection has jumped by almost $70 billion to $348 billion.

What should be the reward for that result?

Take the nation's road system. The country needs a highway program. But for weeks this spring, the highway bill was held up in the Senate in a squalid dispute over which states would get the most and pay the least. Last month, the same measure was pulled back from scheduled floor action in the House because the pork-barrel provisions got so grandiose even the legislators were embarrassed.

No "rewards for results" concept was operating there; it was pure greed and clout.

And there was little but cynicism in the Democrats' decision to rush through an unemployment benefits extension bill. When the measure was needed much earlier in the recession, Congress dawdled. The Democrats were not only tardy but timid. They balked at raising employer taxes to pay for the benefits and instead called on Bush to allow "emergency" deficit financing of the payments. His refusal to bust the budget was predictable. But it leaves the thousands of unemployed workers who have exhausted their benefits without the aid they need.

No "reward for results" there.

I don't want to be too harsh. As a "slogram," a political slogan that purports to be a policy solution, "rewards for results" is light-years ahead of the "flexible freeze," the oxymoronic concept President Bush offered as his 1988 campaign remedy for budget deficits.

It is at least as solid as Bush's "new world order," a concept so elastic that it may be applied to intervening with massive military forces in the Persian Gulf, deferring to Mikhail Gorbachev on recognition of Baltic independence, kowtowing to human-rights abuses in China, or anything else Bush chooses to wrap into the same package.

But the congressional Democrats are tempting the fates by their performance. They think that the polls showing serious concern about domestic problems play into their hands. But they are deluding themselves.

Bush alone reaps the political benefits for managing world crises. And voters blame neglected domestic needs at least as much on Congress as on the White House. Every poll finds Congress faulted more than Bush for the budget deficit and the lagging economy. It is rare to find a poll in which more than one-third of the voters say Congress is doing its job well.

The tom-toms signal that 1992 may be a tougher year for House incumbents than was 1990, when 110 of them (including Gephardt) saw their re-election margins slashed to the lowest levels they had known. The term-limitation movement is spreading, with referenda likely in as many as 17 states this year and next.

The flip side of "rewards for results" is reprisal for inaction. The natives are not only restless, they are mad. "Rewards for results" could come home to haunt Congress.

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