The New York Times, by Jack Rosenthal

Inauguration is always a time for emotions. The Outs try, with mixed success, to keep stiff upper lips as they pack up. The Ins, sure that theirs is a triumph of principle, not just party, flaunt furs and dance till dawn. The feelings of both are understandable and healthy, releasing the energies that keep the political merry-goround turning. But this year, the emotional climate is vastly more complex; roller coaster is more like it. What energies will be released now?

On Tuesday, Ronald Reagan, recently of Pacific Palisades, Calif., 90272, was skillfully demonstrating who's in charge now by taking America on a tour of his Washington. ''Standing here, one faces a magnificent vista, opening up on this city's special beauty and history ...'' he said as the television cameras swept across the heroic monuments. A rare Inaugural moment, yet it was hard to pay attention. One's mind kept slipping into split screen, with the other side tuned to that unseen airport in Teheran.

It was like that all week. Yes, it was sad for departing Democrats; but there was also exhilaration. The poignant picture of Amy Carter in tears at leaving her friends must be paired with the jubilant one of her father embracing former hostages. Yes, it was joyful for arriving Republicans. But they had to share their moment of triumph. As they celebrated in Washington, the country was watching first the door of an airplane in Algiers, then 52 Americans making their way along perhaps the oddest but most welcome diplomatic receiving line ever formed.

Triumph, loss, pride, relief, patriotism, humiliation - all mixed. And before long, anger, as stories of mistreatment filtered back. Sgt. Rodney Sickmann told his family on the phone: ''When we got off the plane, we set our watches ahead 2,000 years.'' Those who still had their watches, that is; Richard Morefield had to fight to keep his wedding ring. Others told of solitary confinement, beatings, elaborate death threats.

Jimmy Carter characterized the mistreatments of the hostages as ''acts of barbarism.'' Small wonder that a Detroit man said, ''I'm damn mad''; that a young woman in Baton Rouge said, ''Let's bomb them''; that Americans everywhere were angry. They were reflecting the split-screen torment: ceremonial patriotism on one side, wounded patriotism on the other. The crisis has imparted a deep unease.

Just as the hostages have to go through a period of psychological decompression, so will the country. The sense of relief may be profound and the direction of the energies released unpredictable.

Which will triumph: an angry desire for revenge, or reasoned selfinterest? Since hawks tend to support him, Mr. Reagan has a strong capacity to guide their passions - and his initial direction is excellent. He says he intends to honor the commitments made to

Iran. And Senator Baker, the Republicans' new Senate majority leader, wisely urges everyone to take it easy: ''The wound is too fresh for us to try to formulate a policy at this time.'' What remains to be done is to help the public understand that Iran remains important to American interests. Why, before the Iranian revolution, did the

United States feel the need to maintain 50,000 Americans there or to provide Iran with billions in modern arms and intelligence equipment? Because America and the West would turn purple without oil imports from the Middle East. The need for those imports is the energy noose, and if an independent Iran should founder, who doubts that there might soon be a Soviet hand on the rope?

At the moment, the public still sees a split screen, with vengeance on one side and vital interest on the other. It will soon be evident how well President Reagan can focus attention on the right one.

For the moment, the hardest job in the Reagan Administration belongs to David Stockman, the young budget director. How shall the budget be cut? It's up to him to figure out which agencies should be chopped off at the knees and which should sacrifice merely a finger or two. There are, naturally, no volunteers. But in a period of boiling inflation, the budget must be cut and the man with the hatchet deserves, if not sympathy, at least suggestions of the most important priorities. Here is the most important one: hunger.

Robert Kennedy helped mobilize the country against hunger, but not many remember that it was Richard Nixon who pledged to end hunger in America. In a decade, the nation has done just that. A medical team toured the country in 1969 and found widespread hunger and malnutrition. A similar survey in 1979 found that malnutrition has substantially disappeared. America has hung a safety net under society. It is called food stamps.

Some conservatives ridicule throwing money at social problems. But food stamps - coupons that poor people can use to buy food with - have fed the hungry. Food stamps, and associated programs, may be the overarching social achievement of our era. This year, the nation will spend $11 billion on stamps to help feed 22 million people, one American in ten.

Yet what are the noises now coming out of the Administration? Alarm; fear that this very growth denotes waste, fraud, freeloaders. It is said that food stamps are among the first things to cut in the budget, saving billions. It is said that all must share the burden. What that means is, let's cut holes in the bottom of the safety net.

How can those who use food stamps do their ''share''? Some recipients can give up all their stamps, or all of them can give up some stamps. Reducing eligibility standards could reduce participation by cutting off the ''richest'' of the poor. But who are they? Mostly they are elderly sick people or the working poor, precisely the kind of people the Reagan Administration wishes to support.

What about cutting benefits? Recipients now get stamps worth, on average, about 40 cents a meal. Is there any humane way to cut that when a paper cup of coffee costs 35 cents? Even 40 cents hardly covers the cost of Washington's bare-bones ''thrifty'' diet. Surely

Mr. Stockman cannot wish to be remembered for a policy of ''Let them eat coffee.'' In truth, the food stamp program has been subject to continous reform in recent years. A million and a half people have been declared ineligible, including

150,000 college students. Virtually all present recipients fall below the Federal poverty line. To cut the program at all, let alone by one-fourth, is to create hunger.

Perhaps cutting other programs would require more sacrifice than taking food out of the mouths of the politically helpless poor, elderly and disabled. If so, let that be clearly demonstrated first. But until then, it is mindless - and cruel - to weigh hunger on the same budget scale as dams, dairy subsidies or interstate highways. Feeding the hungry is the last place to cut the budget.

Who should decide which foreigners are allowed into the United States, the foreigners or the United States? In a responsible society, the question would answer itself. But that's not the way things now work in the United States.

We are a rich and generous country given to bragging about our immigrant origins. When there is obvious need, we live up to the romantic images of Miss Liberty and the Golden Door, taking in waves of freedom fighters or boat people. But romance notwithstanding, there is no longer any such thing as unlimited immigration. A million people are waiting in line to enter the United States legally; millions more are eager to jump the line; and the nation must choose which to let through the door.

The United States now purports to choose, to make its own rational immigration policy. But, in great part the policy is made by hundreds of thousands of individual foreigners who slip into the country illegally. In the process, America loses.

Undocumented farm workers from Mexico, for instance, may be brave and industrious. But each takes a place that, if society were choosing fairly, might be assign instead to a refugee from Somalia, a sister from Korea or a more deserving Mexican applicant. The country is not now making the choice. The more the system spins out of control, the more Americans lose patience with Government - and perhaps with any immigration at all.

How should the country regain control of its own immigration choices? A blue-ribbon commission, led by the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh of Notre Dame, has just provided a careful and reasonable way. Wars are lost for lack of a horseshoe nail; as the commission shows, creating a rational immigration policy turns on a nail called worker identification. That is:

- If the United States wants to decide how much immigration to permit, it must do a far better job of controlling illegal immigrants.

- If the United States wants to control illegal immigrants better, it needs a far better enforcement system than the starved Immigration Service's, and without requiring the Reagan budget-cutters to find much new money.

- If the United States wants effective but economical enforcement, the surest way is through employers, who now are legally free to hire illegal aliens and in any case have no good way to check an employee's status.

- If the United States wants to make an enforcement system effective by making employers culpable, employers must have a reliable way to screen out illegal aliens, without discriminating against legal residents who look or sound foreign.

The Hesburgh Commission could not agree on exactly how to do this. Some members would have workers show forge-resistant Social Security cards. But that conjures up police-state images to others. They would institute an automated call-in system, like that used with credit cards.

Still, whatever the differences over method, almost the entire commission strongly agreed on the need for some secure identification system. One way or another, it's the nail without which the country will keep losing the illegal immigration war.

Now the public focus shifts: to Alan Simpson, Wyoming Republican and new chairman of the Senate immigration subcommittee; to Romano Mazzoli, Kentucky Democrat and new immigration subcommittee chairman in the House. Most of all, attention turns to the Reagan Administration, which has so far evaded the commission - and the issue. Until they act, American immigration policy will stay in foreign hands.

Unity: It was a week for Americans to draw together, first in shock, then in gratitude for miracles. The President seems speeding toward recovery; so do his brave defenders; and each day brings new hope for James Brady, his genial press secretary.

Division: Good news overtook bad so quickly that people were soon free to indulge in two quite different responses. They formed not partisan or ideological blocs but emotional alignments - those who reacted to the shooting with rage and those who reacted with fatalism.

''My reaction,'' said Maureen Reagan, ''is fury and rage and anger that in this country this kind of garbage is still going on. We have got to stop it and we have got to stop it right now.''

''If you sit around and worry,'' said Gerald Ford, ''if you are apprehensive when you go out to see somebody or to have a meeting or make a speech, you just can't operate the way you ought to as President ... you have to let it get out of your mind and go ahead with the business of the day.''

Ragers felt an instant need to demonstrate revulsion, to do something. Some jumped on perceived shortcomings in Secret Service protection. Some insisted that Presidents must be still more insulated from the public. One Senator proposed limiting their appearances to closed-circuit televison. Others found the suggested link between the shooting and a 1976 movie confirmation of their worst fears about the contagion of screen violence.

Fatalists recoiled from the entreaties for instant action. They marveled at how well the Secret Service did - at Timothy McCarthy, who put his body between the President and the blazing gun, at Jerry Parr, whose whole career came down to the instant he thrust the President into the car. Accepting the need for the security that already constrains Presidents, fatalists resisted a complete bubble, cutting off altogether the live contact on which political skill feeds. They were skeptical that censoring screen violence could do much good. Son of Sam's horrors were not triggered by filmed violence but by orders from a 6,000-year-old devil, transmitted through a dog.

To divide public reaction into these categories obviously exaggerates. There is middle ground. One can honor the Secret Service for what it did do - and welcome scrutiny of what it may not have done. And there is room for ragers and fatalists alike to think about what might reasonably be done to reduce violence in American life. There are two sides to the problem -lunatics and guns. Both bear thinking on.

The tide of concern for civil liberties and civil rights in the last 15 years has affected attitudes toward mental patients. Mental hospitals have been reviled as snakepits and cuckoo's nests - not to mention costly. State after state has adopted the doctrine of ''the least restrictive environment.'' Old patients are let out; psychiatrists complain about the daunting difficulty of committing new ones.

Demonstrably, most mental patients are not dangerous. But some are, and in the process of their ''deinstitutionalization,'' the ordinary citizen becomes desensitized to the presence of strange behavior. When alarming, or merely pitiful, public conduct is no longer noticed, a wise society should think harder about protecting the mentally ill, and itself. Closer control of troubled people might not prevent assassination attempts, any more than closer control of guns would necessarily discourage someone determined to shoot a President. But both steps could curtail ordinary violence and crime.

There is no cogent argument for permitting free access to handguns. People with a legitimate need for them should not balk for a moment at sensible controls. But cogency is not the problem; it is politics.

Only after Robert Kennedy's murder was it possible to overcome the vaunted gun lobby and enact a modest handgun control law. Is further progress possible now? Perhaps, and one political figure has special standing to make it possible. Think what a breakthrough it would be if President Reagan, as he leaves the hospital this week, were to endorse reasonable handgun controls. What a victory it would be for rage, and fatalism, and life.

What has Ronald Reagan declared war on? If, as first appeared, the enemy is America's economic straits, then many of us, suspending neutrality or partisanship, are willing to enlist. But increasingly we're dogged by the suspicion that he also has another enemy in mind: the philosophy of social justice this country has evolved over the last 50 years.

''I don't think people are entitled to any services,'' says Budget Director Stockman. Martin Anderson, the President's chief domestic adviser, says, ''People are quite benevolent. That's good. But it's quite a different thing for people to demand that they have a right to a certain amount of income or services.'' And elsewhere the Administration says that services chopped out of the Federal budget can be supplied by the states, or business or volunteers.

In other words, there is no such thing as social obligation. There is only charity - someone else's charity. If that is the Administration's philosophy, it deserves to be denounced.

First, some semantic business. Standing alone, the budgeteers' word ''entitlements'' certainly does sound arrogant. The poor are not constitutionally entitled to any services they deem necessary. But there are some things people should not have to beg for.

Food, for instance, or safe housing, or a lawyer when there's trouble. Would Mr. Stockman or Mr. Anderson deny a sick person access to a hospital emergency room? Surely not. Is that an entitlement to medical services? Call it what you will.

Americans are a generous people, exceedingly generous. Carl Bakal has written that our collective private philanthropy comes to about $180 a day for each man, woman and child in the nation. In Canada, it's $35. There is a vast role for private philanthropy; there may even be a case for enlarging it. Maybe, when Federal job programs are chopped back, industry could help pick up the slack. Maybe, when funding for legal services is eviscerated, private law firms could step in. Maybe. But two problems get in the way.

If this idea of charity, of supplanting Federal social justice with private voluntary action, is sincere, then why does the Administration not pursue it?

The genial host, corporate persuader and Great Communicator in the White House needs no lessons in stimulating the private sector. Has he invited the heads of the 100 biggest companies to the White House to encourage them to create a private job program large enough to offset his budget cuts? Has he assembled partners from large law firms and urged them to provide surrogate legal services?

No. Which raises the suspicion that his Administration is much less interested in proving theories than in abandoning social welfare altogether.

Even if the Administration now injected action into this theory of voluntarism, it would not suffice. Deep down, society knows that. Consider jobs. Franklin Roosevelt wrote to a friend in 1934 that ''I cannot say so out loud yet, but I hope to be able to substitute work for relief.'' In 1965, Lyndon Johnson and Henry Ford II launched their then-celebrated, soonforgotten JOBS program. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter all had similar ideas. One after another, under the pressure of this merger or that retrenchment, they disappeared.

But assume that a voluntary jobs program could work. How much more can voluntarism do, generally? Federal spending constitutes threefourths of the total spent for social welfare. Even if Mr. Reagan could mobilize every one of the 800,000-odd charitable institutions, he could not begin to replace Government's role in providing services that help people ranging from alcoholics to lactating mothers.

The Federal Government has undertaken so many services because society has learned that the states alone cannot combat hunger, that volunteers alone cannot provide minimal medical care. Society has turned to the Federal Government because it is the logical place to address such needs, through the organization of voluntary programs like VISTA, or the Foster Grandparent program that Mrs. Reagan has taken to heart.

That Washington is the logical place doesn't mean it is necessarily efficient, or effective, or even humane. But to say ''no entitlements,'' or ''let the states do it,'' or ''let the private sector do it'' is a barely varnished way of saying ''Don't do it.'' And that is not a war against inflation. It is a war against the poor.

Even as President Reagan recovers from the attempt on his life comes a startling report from California. Sirhan Sirhan, who assassinated Robert Kennedy in June 1968 is scheduled for release in the summer of 1984, and then on to asylum in Libya. How come so soon? He has been, says a prison official, ''a model prisoner'' and the parole agency is determined to treat him like any other murderer. What a false sense of fairness. What a disservice to the country.

When Sirhan was convicted in 1969, the jury sentenced him to die in the gas chamber. In 1972, while his appeal was pending, he was spared by a coincidence. California eliminated the death penalty. That meant the maximum sentence was life, with the possibility of parole. Possibility, however, did not automatically mean eligibility. He won a parole date only because the California Adult Authority insisted on treating him like other murderers. Typically, they serve about 16 or 17 years before winning parole. By George, then Sirhan would get the same consideration.

A new parole agency, the Board of Prison Terms, has since been established. But it, too, insists on handling the Sirhan case ''in the manner normally accorded to all life prisoners.'' Even if the board now wanted to treat the case differently, a spokesman says, it's too late; there is no authority to rescind Sirhan's parole date.

It is a tenet of democracy that the life of an ordinary citizen is as precious as that of someone rich, famous or powerful. But that is not the same as arguing that one murder is the same as another. Even the California board now sets a minimum term of 19 years for someone who kills a prison guard compared with 17 or 15 years for a more routine street killing.

Even these distinctions do not describe the order-of-magnitude difference of Sirhan's crime. Assassina-tion is an attack not merely on an individual life but on the political life of the country. It has to be measured on a different scale, a principle recognized in the enactment of specific Federal laws relating to assassination attempts on the President, Vice President or members of Congress.

It mocks society to deny this difference by treating Sirhan ''normally.'' Consider the possible effect on deterrence. It may be impossible to stop an assassin willing to exchange his life for that of the President.

But California invites a deranged or fevered mind to make a much different calculation: if I can stand 16 years in prison, a brave martyr to my friends, then I can expect to be lionized for life in Libya.

To treat Sirhan ''normally'' also mocks the opponents of capital punishment, by making their opposition look like opposition to punishment, period. These people include Edward Kennedy, who in an act of surpassing humanity in 1969, urged that Sirhan's death sentence be reduced to life imprisonment. If the ultimate effect of such humane appeals turns out to be life in Libya instead of in prison, who will believe in an alternative called life with no parole?

Is that what his term should be? We have no desire to be vengeful; we do not necessarily oppose his release, at some point, though we do not know what that point is. What we do know is that to deal with Sirhan as just another murderer communicates something about the value American society places on itself.

California parole authorities still can't or won't send the message - to lunatics, foreigners and society - that America thinks its political life is worth more than 16 years in prison. So the nation must now look to Governor Brown and the California legislature. What message do they wish to send? What kind of prisoner do they regard as the model assassin?

Don't try to tell Charles Manatt that there's no projectioninfection problem in national elections. He's now chairman of the Democratic National Committee, but last Nov. 4 he was walking a North Hollywood precinct for a California Congressman. Though the polls were still open, television had already projected the Reagan win. ''In three different households,'' he recalls, ''people said, hadn't I heard - the election was over. There was no point in going to vote.''

Since his candidate lost by 800 votes, Mr. Manatt has reason for thinking that projections make a difference - not in Presidential elections but in other races. Some West Coast contests turned on as few as 25 votes. If projections (and Jimmy Carter's quick concession) discouraged even a few late voters from going to the polls, they may have been decisive.

Is there a remedy? In hearings today, Senator Mathias's Rules and Administration Committee will explore that question, and at least two interesting answers. One strikes us as clearly preferable, but either would be better than doing nothing.

The network news divisions seem skeptical about the problem. NBC News finds no serious study showing that projections have actually influenced outcomes. Accept that. Still, it remains easily imaginable that projection could mean infection. That being so, what harm is there in trying to avoid it?

One remedy would be for the networks voluntarily to abandon projections, as proposed jointly by the League of Women Voters, the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate and other groups: ''There is one night every four years when the people should be allowed their full and fair opportunity to speak, when ... their story should be told as it unfolds. Political projections ... should be used sparingly, if at all.''

The advocates mean to be constructive, and they believe in freedom of the press. Yet their proposal leaves us uneasy. The freedom and duty to inform is eroded as certainly by a succession of voluntary, constructive means as by hostile assaults. If there were no other remedies, this one might warrant scrutiny. But there is another: the 24-hour voting day.

This is not a new idea; it was advanced in 1964 by CBS's Frank Stanton. Voting places in each time belt would be open a full 24 hours, opening and closing simultaneously. That would address the projection problem. And it might well encourage voter turnout, especially if coupled with Representative Mario Biaggi's appealing proposal to move Election Day to Sunday.

The 24-hour vote would not wholly eliminate the projection problem; there might be a temptation to report, even before the period ends, on election-day survey interviews. But the voters would be left with only one truly key precinct - their own.

''On Friday,'' writes a man we know who likes his baseball, ''I would have gone home after work, had dinner and then settled down to watch the Yankees on TV. But since there was no game, I grabbed a sandwich at the deli and went to see 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.' Entertaining, but I went home in a sour mood nevertheless. On Saturday, when I might have watched part of the game before going to a party, I finished 'Gorky Park' and still got to the party too early.

''On Sunday, I got into an argument with a friend who's delighted with the strike. He thinks baseball is the most boring sport ever invented. Normally, I'm patient with baseball critics. If they can't appreciate its constant potential for the heroic, the sly and the unpredictable, that's their loss. This time, I was surprised by my passion. Why so short-tempered, I wondered? I think it's because I'm afraid of something.

''Deep down, I know baseball is just as crass and unruly as the real world, but I prefer the illusion: baseball as an amiable, ordered world contained within the neat geometry of a stadium. Colonel and cab driver alike can argue with fine equality about a player trade or a ninth-inning bunt. The rules are known to all, and the unending variations are available to all for interpretation.

''Strike or no strike, the need for the small change of conversation persists. Already I hear people talking in the corridors the way they do in the wintertime, in what the sports writers call the Hot Stove League. The strike, says an Oriole rooter, is a hidden blessing to the Yankees, giving its injured pitchers time to heal. Perhaps not, says a Yankee fan; it may be a curse, cooling off the intensity that produced 9 wins in their last 11 games.

''But soon the speculation will turn stale. The longer the strike lasts, the more games that are wiped out and the more statistics that are defiled, the more the illusion of shared order will be defiled as well. Then baseball will look just as messy as the world outside the stadium. What I wonder is, do the owners and the players understand that? What I'm afraid of is that illusions only die once.''

Ronald Reagan's anti-poverty program has three fronts. One is the social safety net, protecting ''those with true need.'' A second is voluntarism, private charity to offset Federal cuts. The third and most important is economic recovery, the rising tide that John Kennedy said would lift all the boats. As the Administration ends its first year, the poor are losing on all three fronts - and so badly that a question begins to reverberate: what is Mr. Reagan warring against, poverty or the poor?

We will continue to fulfill the obligations that spring from our national conscience.... All those with true need can rest assured that the social safety net of programs they depend on are exempt from any cuts.

That was how the President introduced the safety net last February. Its seven programs were only a partial net to begin with, protecting some middle-class benefits while omitting programs that, on their face, help the very poor.

Even so, there have been sharp cuts even in the exempt programs. School lunch and breakfast programs were in the safety net. Yet about 300,000 poor children no longer get lunch in school. Summer youth jobs were in the safety net. Those funds have been cut 27 percent.

Meanwhile, programs that should have been in the net have also been cut, even savaged. Since the Nixon Administration, it has been national policy to eliminate hunger. Food stamps have been a welltargeted way to meet that goal. Yet a million people in need will lose their food stamps altogether and most of the 22 million recipients will suffer reductions.

With the same energy that Franklin Roosevelt sought Government solutions to problems, we will seek private solutions. Big Government is not the only way, the President told a business audience in October. Exactly right: there is a deep strain of decent, charitable instincts in American society and Mr. Reagan has appointed a 44-member commission to find new ways to reach private resources. It is a commendable exercise. It is also a fig leaf.

How much can private supplant public services for the poor? Few of them send their children to pri-vate schools, use limousines and taxis or hire guards. They lose most from cuts in Federal funds for elementary and secondary schools, or urban mass transit or law enforcement. Governors and mayors understand the cuts; poor people feel them.

In all, Mr. Reagan has so far cut about $25 billion in social spending. If business giving, $2.7 billion last year, were to double, it would barely fill 10 percent of the gap. Even the Administration acknowledges the point. ''I wish the words 'fill the gap' had never been used,'' says Mr. Reagan's assistant for voluntarism.

Our aim is to increase our national wealth so all will have more, not just redistribute what we already have, which is just a sharing of scarcity.

When the President said that last February, the inflation rate was nearly 12 percent. Now it is down below 10. Much to the good - but at what price? The unemployment rate was 7.5 percent a year ago; it is 8.4 percent now. That means about a million more people are out of work (and extended unemployment insurance benefits are no longer as readily available). An ebbing tide lifts no boats.

Mr. Reagan believes that, if the Administration persists in its program, the tide will turn. A more apt maritime image is offered by Herbert Stein, economic adviser to President Nixon: ''If the captain of the ship sets out from New York harbor with a plan of sailing north to Miami, 'Steady as you go!' will not be a sustainable policy, and that will be clear before the icebergs are sighted.''

For poor people, the issue is not an abstract matter of ideology, or whether the Administration is right to keep the faith and wait. For them, the questions are simple: what do they do in the meantime? Why, when the Administration is so willing to increase windfall oil profits or reduce inheritance taxes, is so much of the burden heaped on their backs? In short, what safety net? What voluntarism? What rising tide?

There is only one way in which Mr. Reagan's poverty program has provided for the poor. It is the way prescribed by Reaganaut theoreticians, notably George Gilder in ''Wealth and Poverty,'' the book widely circulated in the Administration earlier this year. ''In order to succeed,'' he wrote, ''the poor need most of all the spur of their poverty.''