Clinton’s “counterbudget,” unveiled last week, may look like one more White House zigzag. But it represents a divorce he has long sought from liberal congressional Democrats. Clinton came to Washington convinced that his party had to move to the center to survive. Unable to attract Republican votes in Congress (with the exception of NAFTA), he was forced to kowtow to the old Democratic coalition for the first two years. Clinton now thinks the new budget is his last chance to move to the center before 1996.

Even after the April session in the Cabinet Room, some White House aides wondered if Clinton was serious. They suspected that once confronted with the deep cuts needed to eliminate the deficit, he’d wilt. But Clinton had strong backing from Vice President Al Gore and two newcomers–domestic-policy adviser Bill Curry and political consultant Dick Morris, a Democrat turned Republican who worked for Clinton back in Arkansas. To the dismay of liberal aides like George Stephanopoulos, Morris was especially influential in arguing that Clinton needed to engage the Republicans sooner rather than later. “The more time he spent with the president.” said one adviser to a key cabinet member, “the more the president sounded like Dick Morris.”

By mid-May, Clinton was, as one aide described him, “a man on a mission.” He asked number crunchers if he could match the GaP plans to balance the budget in seven years and still protect the education and job-training programs he cherishes. The answer was no. Soon he was looking at making the cuts over a longer period of time. He tipped his hand when he told a New Hampshire radio station on May 19 that the budget could be balanced “in less than 10 years.” That confused members of his economic team, who despite endless meetings with the president still weren’t sure what he wanted to do. They sat in the Roosevelt Room three days later, asking themselves what “less than 10” meant: eight years? nine? Finally, deputy chief of staff Erskine Bowles got up and walked into the Oval Office to ask Clinton. The answer he came back with was 10. Over Memorial Day weekend, with First Lady Hillary Clinton out of town, Clinton obsessively ran the numbers, calling budget director Alice Rivlin at home asking for more data. House and Senate Democratic leaders Richard Gephardt and Tom Daschle pleaded with him to hold off, but by early June he was set. Over 10 years, Clinton would cut $1 trillion in federal spending, reducing Medicare spending by $127 billion (drastically less than the GaP wants to do) and paring corporate subsidies. If he had any final doubts about the moderate document, they vanished after his joint New Hampshire appearance with House Speaker Gingrich on June 11. When Clinton returned to the White House the following Monday, he told a delegation of small businesspeople how taken he was by the audience’s desire for more partisan cooperation and less head knocking.

Clinton’s five-minute speech about the plan infuriated many congressional Democrats. In a meeting with Rivlin the next morning, several savaged the president for selling them out on the let-’em-sweat strategy they thought he’d committed to. But liberal “Housecrats” are only one part of a deeply fractious party. Centrist “Senatecrats,” as Hill insiders now call them, were easier on Clinton, but fretted in private. Republicans were all over the map, first sniping then offering cautious praise. Finally, they were poking holes in the White House plan, saying that it overestimated future economic growth and wouldn’t really eliminate the deficit. But the GOP knows what some Democrats still don’t seem to get. Now that Clinton has his own balanced-budget scenario, he can attack Republican excesses more credibly later this summer. That may make him a sellout to liberals, but it could also be his party’s ticket back to the White House in 1996.