The Senate's self-proclaimed fiscal cop

Kent Conrad doesn't mind being called a prairie populist. Or a chart-toting MBA nerd. (His wife says he refigures batting averages in his head after hits at baseball games.)

But the senior senator from North Dakota didn't like it when a recent national column referred to him as an "antique" fiscal conservative. "I'm actually quite young," he says.

And he liked it even less when the president's chief economic adviser told bankers recently that Senator Conrad's views would likely cause "adverse economic consequences" for the American economy and even "the entire global economy."

If the criticism is heating up, it's because these views suddenly count. As new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, Mr. Conrad is insisting that Congress keep to its promises to preserve Social Security and Medicare trust funds - that is, to use surpluses to pay down national debt.

But that view is putting the White House in a box. With the economy slowing, priorities such as defense and education may not be able to be funded without breaking into at least the Medicare surplus. Already, the GOP leadership - which has always defended preserving both trust funds - is beginning to drop all mention of Medicare from speeches.

Conrad insists neither will be touched. And, for now, Democrats in both the House and Senate say they will back him. "The biggest problem the administration has with Conrad is that he has extraordinary credibility on this issue - and he's been consistent on this for all his career," says Stanley Collender, a budget expert at Fleishman Hillard, a communications firm.

Since coming to the Senate in 1987, Conrad has had one big theme on his mind: fiscal responsibility. Keep to the budget. Pay down the debt. Don't break into the Social Security or Medicare surpluses.

He talks about it. He makes charts about it. He even resigned his Senate seat in 1992 after failing to fulfill a campaign promise to bring down the federal deficit. (The deficit doubled. But he was drafted to run again to fill the state's other Senate seat, which opened up a few months later.)

Now, as the new chairman of the Senate Budget Committee, he's finally in a position to do something about it. One way to keep this issue visible is the gavel. As committee chairman, Conrad is calling in administration officials to explain how they expect to pay for, say, $18 billion in new defense spending, without breaking into Social Security and Medicare trust funds.

For the first time, this year's budget resolution also gives the Senate Budget chairman the right to refuse to release up to $450 billion in so-called reserve funds, if proposed new spending would dip into either the Social Security or Medicare trust funds.

Conrad didn't support Bush's budget or his $1.35 trillion tax cut. He said it was too big and would eat into the Social Security and Medicare trust funds that both parties said they were committed to preserve.

But he's determined to make sure that the administration keeps to its budget - or takes a hit at the polls when the surpluses disappear. If the nation doesn't continue to use surpluses to pay down the debt, it will be in no shape to meet "the obligation" of paying for Medicare and Social Security when baby boomers retire, he says.

"This isn't about accounting niceties," said the owlish Conrad in an interview on Capitol Hill. "The baby boom generation is not a forecast. These people have been born. They're alive today. They're going to retire, and the government owes them money."

Conrad can be aggressive in making sure numbers add up. Earlier in his career, he became the most popular tax collector in North Dakota history - if there is such a thing - in part by going after big businesses outside the state that didn't pay their full obligations. It helped earn him the nickname "chainsaw."

Debt, too, looms large in Conrad's thought. He was raised by his grandparents (his parents were killed by a drunk driver when he was 5), and they struggled for years to pay off red ink accrued after a local bank they owned stock in faltered during the Great Depression.

"In those days, when a bank ran short of funds, they called the stockholders to run down and bring more money," he says. "My grandfather was a very responsible man. He never declared bankruptcy. You got from him a sense that you meet your obligations."

Later, as state tax commissioner, Conrad saw family farms crushed by debt. When he first came to the Senate, he started a deficit-reduction caucus - a handful of members that met once a week to plan ways out of the nation's spiral of debt.

"In those days, none of us could even envision a surplus," says former Sen. Robert Packwood (R) of Oregon, a colleague on the caucus. "With Kent, it was always study, study, study, so that everyone fully understood what the problem was. Most people hadn't really focused on it."

Lately, Conrad has been trying to remind his colleagues of those bad old days. His staff scours used bookstores for copies of David Stockman's "The Triumph of Politics: Why the Reagan Revolution Failed." He hands out copies of this confession by Reagan's director of the Office of Management and Budget as a caution that rosy budget projections don't always pan out and big tax cuts can drive the nation into a fiscal ditch.

Administration officials say that talk of looming deficits is "alarmist." The nation is nowhere near the monster deficits of the 1980s, says Mitchell Daniels, the current OMB director. And it's wrong to exclude Social Security and Medicare Trust funds when thinking about the size of the budget surplus, he adds.

"It's like saying that Tiger Woods had a very mediocre season, if you don't count the Masters, the two Opens, and the PGA. These are massive surpluses," he adds.

While administration officials may tussle with Conrad on budgets, they probably aren't going to intimidate him politically. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan campaigned against the young candidate, then running for the first time for Congress, using the line: "The last thing we need is another tax collector in the US Senate." Conrad won.

Nor is anyone likely to outduel the senator when it comes to numbers, if not on federal accounting, then at least on baseball. To this day, his wife, Lucy Calautti, a Major League baseball lobbyist herself, says: "If we talk about where to go on vacation, it often has something to do with where there is spring training or winter ball."

The senator keeps a collection of signed baseballs in his Capitol Hill office, as well as a framed Orioles uniform with his name on it. As for this idea that he can refigure batting averages in his head - accurately - Ms. Calautti says: "I've tested him. When the guy gets up for bat the next time, the average has changed to just what Kent said it would be."