PERSPECTIVE ON MOVIE STARS : Miss Marmelstein Goes to Washington : Streisand and other Hollywood enablers of the Clinton presidency try for their 15 minutes of political fame.

More than three decades ago, followers of Broadway theater were briefly diverted by a new production called “I Can Get It for You Wholesale,” a musical comedy, based on Jerome Weidman’s novel of the same name, about the garment industry. The highlight of Harold Rome’s score was a number called “Miss Marmelstein,” in which a mousy wallflower left her secretary’s desk and burst into explosive, oddly seductive song. Night after night, the young woman who portrayed Miss Marmelstein brought down the house.

The actress who made her Broadway debut in that role went on to a career that has been every wallflower’s dream: singer, movie star, movie director, pop icon of the first order. Now, not content with the crown jewels of Broadway and Hollywood, Miss Marmelstein has set her eyes on those of the nation’s capital; whether it will be able to resist her singular if peculiar charms has become, in the corners of Washington where such things matter, the question of the hour.

Truth to tell, it may have little choice in the matter, for history suggests that whatever Barbra Streisand wants, Barbra Streisand gets. The mousy Miss Marmelstein has metamorphosed into a conglomerate capable of terrorizing any persons unfortunate enough to find themselves in her path. At the moment, those in this vulnerable position range from the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff to the President of the United States; the possibility that any or all of them will be blown away by Hurricane Barbra must be taken very seriously.

This is because Streisand herself is very, very serious about the Siege of Washington, so serious that last week she permitted the Wall Street Journal to interview her about her new life as political savant. Its reporter, Timothy K. Smith, found Streisand “holed up in her Manhattan apartment with a stack of books about Thomas Jefferson,” which is nothing if not the picture perfect of a Hollywood star in the first throes of political passion.

With the rarest of exceptions--give me a week and I’ll think of one--show-business folk don’t think, they react. Theatricality itself can be said to be consisting of exaggerated responses to everything from the Chernobyl disaster--Streisand was “absolutely horrified” by it, a friend says--to Chinese takeout food.

Theatricality is a splendid quality--in the theater. In most other human endeavors, it more often than not is inadequate to the task at hand. It is all well and good to wring one’s hands over nuclear annihilation and AIDS research and other matters with which La Barbra has chosen to become involved, but it is another thing to think them through clinically and objectively.

This the Hollywood mind is simply incapable of doing. It sees issues in terms of their drama rather than their content. Thus Smith reports that Streisand’s “politics and her cinema are . . . becoming indistinguishable” and notes: “Right now she is working on a film version of ‘The Normal Heart,’ Larry Kramer’s play about the early days of the AIDS epidemic. She recently picked up an option to make a movie about Lt. Col. Margarethe Cammermeyer, who was forced to resign from the Washington National Guard when she acknowledged that she is a lesbian.”

Fine. Movie stars and movie directors can do films about any old thing they jolly well please. It is true that where complex political or social issues are involved, they invariably will sentimentalize, overdramatize and oversimplify those issues, but that is permissible under what passes these days for artistic license. It is also true that they will mislead a great many moviegoers into equally fatuous interpretations of those issues, butpeople who are foolish enough to take their lessons in politics from movies and movie stars cannot be expected to know better.

On the other hand, politicians and others in ostensible service to the public can be expected to know better. However manifold and breathtaking the shortcomings of these men and women, by and large they know that public issues are not susceptible to theatrical resolution. However devious may be the working methods of successful politicians, they employ melodrama only for public effect; in private they know that theatrics will get them nowhere, that compromise is the essence of success.

But to the Hollywood types who of late have descended upon Washington--in Smith’s nice phrase, “a flying wedge of glamorous nitwits, jetting in from the coast to have their political credentials validated”--compromise is inconceivable. The entire system under which they have achieved celebrity is designed to convince them of their own infallibility.

It is almost, though not quite, tempting to feel sorry for them. After all, for months during his campaign, Bill Clinton encouraged these people in every fantasy they ever entertained about their capacity to solve every problem from Bosnia to the compact-disc long box; that is the price Clinton paid for the hundreds of thousands of dollars that these glitterati contributed to or raised for him. Now that he is in office, shouldn’t they feel confirmed in the wisdom of their intellects and empowered, as we like to say these days, to solve the world’s problems?

So here they come, traipsing down the Yellow Brick Road: La Barbra and her legions. Not since Coxey’s Army has so bizarre an invading power launched so quixotic an assault on Washington. What they fail to understand is that the cynicism of the city in which their celebrity was achieved is of a far lower order than that of this complacent, weary old capital. Washington knows what they do not: that when it comes to real political power, Hollywood has about as much clout as Miss Marmelstein.