WASHINGTON INSIGHT

DEMOCRATIC DEAVER: The Democrats liked to portray him as media manipulator when he managed President Ronald Reagan’s public image, but the Clinton White House now is looking for someone in the mold of Michael K. Deaver to bring order to its chaotic and sometimes-contradictory communications. In a summer of mixed signals on foreign policy and sometimes even the Clinton health strategy, Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta has made it a top priority to hire or assign someone to make sure that the presidential message is delivered in the proper setting and consistency. “Somebody did this for Ronald Reagan, for Richard Nixon, for John Kennedy,” said one adviser. “But nobody’s been paying attention to it” for this Administration. The catch, of course, is that instituting Central Message Control entails some loss of autonomy for top-ranked aides, Cabinet officials--and for a President with a legendary fondness for free-form think-aloud sessions.

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SWITCHING TO COLOR: The distinguished Alabama senator felt a tickle in his nose and reached to his pocket for a handkerchief. Everyone at the lunch table that day last week, with the exception of the distinguished Alabama senator, noted that the handkerchief wasn’t a handkerchief at all, but a pair of white panties. He blew his nose and returned them to his pocket. A short time later, Democratic Sen. Howell Heflin pulled them out once more--only this time he recognized the garment. Just one thing could make matters worse. The lunch table was filled with reporters. By the next morning, all of Washington was atwitter. That afternoon, the jowly senator issued a statement headed: “Handkerchief.” Under it were two sentences: “I mistakenly picked up a pair of my wife’s white panties and put them in my pocket while I was rushing out the door to go to work. Rather than take a chance on being embarrassed again, I’m going to start buying colored handkerchiefs.” He was seen the next day sporting a maroon one.

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SCALLOP GALLOP: The Clinton Administration has often been accused of muddy policy on international issues, but on one question the State Department is as clear as a mountain stream: mollusks. State Department spokesman Michael D. McCurry was asked Wednesday about Canada’s seizure of an American fishing vessel that was taking Icelandic scallops off Newfoundland. “The issue arises, is this a sedentary species or a mobile species?” McCurry said solemnly. “And being that these are mollusks, we sort of believe that, as you probably know, mollusks can swim. They swim by rapidly clapping their fluted bivalve shells together as they propel themselves through the water. And for that reason, they are not, in our view, sedentary.” The point, he added, is that since scallops swim, they are fair game for U.S. fishermen. Canada, of course, says that scallops don’t swim--at least, not enough to make them fair game under the Law of the Sea.

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SAY WHAT YOU MEAN: Colorful Sen. Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.) gave his prescription for solving the crime problem: “Salt away” vicious criminals whom he described as “dull-witted, slack-jawed sloths.” The real question before Congress, according to the senator, is “how to get these creeps, these slobs, off the street.”