But even as he glories in victory, Green-span’s championship team is starting to look a bit ragged. Legislation to change the way the Fed does business has exposed a split running clear through the central bank. The issue: should the Fed focus solely on holding down prices, or should it worry about jobs and growth as well? Greenspan and anti-inflation hard-liners are on one side; Clinton’s appointees dominate the other. Their debate has finally gone public, providing a rare glimpse of the Fed’s philosophical divide. It is, says economist Albert Wojnilower of New York’s Clipper Group,“a little Kulturkampf within the Fed.”

Obscure, you say? Perhaps-but vitally important. Since 1978, when Congress passed the Humphrey-Hawkins Act, the Fed has been charged with two conflicting goals. It’s supposed to keep both the inflation rate and the adult jobless rate at $ percent. Talk about a liberal fantasy. Unemployment hasn’t been that low-since the Vietnam boom of the late 1960s-precisely the time inflation began to rage. Enter Sen. Connie Mack, a Florida Republican. Mack would scrap Humphrey-Hawkins and make “price stability” the priority. The Fed would have to set a target-say, a 1 percent rise in consumer prices-and manage monetary policy to hit it.

Targeting inflation doesn’t sound so radical. “In my view, that’s what they’re doing right now,” says Donald Fine of Chase Asset Management. But what about the next time there’s a recession? Should the Fed ignore rising unemployment, as Germany’s Bundesbank does, and think only about inflation? Here’s where the central bankers are at odds. Fed governor Janet Yellen, a Clinton appointee, argued last month for weighing employment as well as prices. A week later William McDonough, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, supported a strict inflation focus. Gary Stern of the Minneapolis Fed jumped in on Yellen’s side. So did Clinton’s two new Fed nominees, Alice Rivlin and Laurence Meyer. Other Fed officials haven’t spoken out, but most are thought to agree with McDonough.

The conflict isn’t affecting Fed policy for now. The central bankers agree that unemployment can’t go much lower without threatening inflation. In the future, though, Mack’s bill would let Greenspan insist that Congress judge him as an inflation fighter, not as a job creator. “This would allow us to subtly shift the public discussion,” says Richmond Fed economist Marvin Good-friend. And what about jobs? Low inflation, Mack insists, is the key to higher incomes and higher living standards. But on that point, well, economists disagree…