WASHINGTON INSIGHT

WHERE THERE’S SMOKE: While debate on tobacco issues largely has been along partisan lines in the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee on health--with Democrats waging war on tobacco and Republicans, some from tobacco growing states, leaping to the industry’s defense--just the opposite has happened away from Capitol Hill. . . . One of the prime movers behind the Food and Drug Administration’s action toward regulating tobacco products was--and still is--Jeff Nesbit, who once worked at the FDA but was better known as a top aide to Dan Quayle, both in the Senate and later when Quayle was vice president. On the other side, two prominent Democrats are helping the beleaguered Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp. with its defense: Griffin B. Bell, attorney general in the Jimmy Carter Administration who is serving as the company’s lawyer, and former Carter Press Secretary Jody Powell, whose company has been doing PR work for Brown & Williamson. Powell is a longtime smoker who has tried to quit for many years.

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PUT OUT: President Clinton is not winning many points from his hard-working National Security Council staff. Among the few perks that they receive in return for the long hours, including standard weekend workdays, are invitations to state dinners during the visits of foreign dignitaries--at least during other recent presidencies. But for the Clintons’ state dinner for Japanese Emperor Akihito this month, members of the NSC staff could be heard grumbling that neither Asian staff director Stanley Roth nor any of the other Asia specialists who had done all the legwork before the visit were included. Only National Security Adviser Anthony Lake and his deputy, Samuel (Sandy) Berger--neither Asia specialists--received the prized invitations. . . . Staff specialists in Africa and European affairs already are watching who will get the nod for the next two state dinners, scheduled for visits by Russian President Boris N. Yeltsin and South African President Nelson Mandela this fall.

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STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: Although Clinton gets nothing but abuse from most conservatives, he has been quietly getting a helping hand from the right-wing Heritage Foundation, the intellectual fountainhead for the policies that sparked the Reagan Revolution. . . . After polling the nation’s governors, The foundation furnished Clinton’s chief trade negotiator, Mickey Kantor, with the useful information that no fewer than 43 of them supported the North American Free Trade Agreement, which many liberal Democrats didn’t like. The foundation also has provided Clinton aides with data to aid proposals to privatize the nation’s air traffic control system and with material on deregulation to spur Clinton’s drive to reinvent government. . . . But all is not sweetness and light. “When we don’t agree, I use the stick-in-the-eye approach,” said Dave Mason, head of the foundation’s executive liaison operation, citing a recent Heritage report documenting what he calls Clinton’s “foreign policy flip-flops.”

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PRAY FOR O.J.? Senate tongues are clucking over the prayer recently offered by the Senate chaplain, the Rev. Richard C. Halverson, for O.J. Simpson, accused of murdering his wife and her friend. “Whether he is innocent or guilty rests with our system of justice, but our hearts go out to him in his profound loss,” Halverson said. Critics lamented that he barely mentioned the two victims and said nothing about the Simpson children in his prayer opening the Senate session.