The source of the conflict between Bill Clinton and the Republican leaders of Congress can be summarized in two words: power and politics.
What we are witnessing is one of its most intense and vitriolic struggles for power: A political war that pits Newt Gingrich, Bob Dole and their conservative legions on Capitol Hill against Clinton and his White House team.All have their eye on a single target: the 1996 presidential election.
Dole is an announced candidate. Gingrich is toying with the idea of becoming a candidate. Clinton is off and running.
The weapons they are lobbing at each other are fiery projectiles of hyperbole regarding such issues as a balanced budget, Medicare, welfare reform, education and protection of the environment.
It would be unfair and incorrect to convey the impression that the two sides are impelled only by political opportunism, although that is a major motivating factor.
Many true believers in each camp are convinced they are serving the best interests of the nation.
The Republicans are determined to implement their promise to reduce federal spending, shrink the size of government and abolish some programs and agencies that trace their heritage back to the New Deal and Great Society. Their goal: a balanced budget by 2002.
The Democrats, noting that they already have cut the deficit and the size of government, also claim to be headed toward a balanced budget - but not at the expense of the elderly who depend on Medicare or the young who depend on education.
They have other traditional constituencies, including poor people and minorities, to protect and they intend to do so.
One of the factors that makes the current confrontation different from those of the past is that the Republicans have an especially aggressive, able and often arrogant leader in Gingrich, a conservative ideologue who has injected the GOP's right wing with an energy it has not known since the early days of Ronald Reagan's presidency.
Another factor is the current political dichotomy, which has been duplicated only once before in this century. It features an incumbent Democratic president battling a Republican Congress as he enters an election campaign.
The last time such a division existed was in 1947-48, when Harry Truman sat in the White House and Republicans like Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft and Massachusetts Rep. Joseph W. Martin ran the affairs of Capitol Hill.
Like Gingrich, Taft was the ideological chieftain of the conservatives and, like Dole, he was seeking his party's presidential nomination. In matters of domestic policy, he was the most powerful Republican on Capitol Hill.
After ousting 55 Democrats from the House and 12 from the Senate in the 1946 congressional elections, Republicans were convinced they would win the presidency in 1948.
Truman stood up and fought his opponents just as Clinton finally is doing today.