WASHINGTON INSIGHT

KINDRED COUNSEL: From abroad comes this piece of pointed advice for congressional Democrats carping about President Clinton’s direction. Tony Blair--who has led England’s Labor Party back to the brink of power with an agenda of Clinton-like centrism--complained in a recent interview that American Democrats are underestimating Clinton’s value to them. Blair said that it is important Democrats “don’t sit there and be commentators on Clinton. What he’s doing is opening up the space in which new ideas, driven by different values, can come [forward.]” If Clinton wasn’t in “that space,” Blair continued, “you’d have Mr. [Newt] Gingrich. So just face up to that.” With that advice for American liberals, Blair may have had one eye on his own left flank: Though he has steered the party to a commanding 25-point lead over the ruling Conservative government in the election scheduled for May 1, Blair faces steady grumbling from liberals who maintain that he has surrendered too much of his party’s heritage.

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HIGHER PROFILE: Nearly four score years after Congress muscled a 13-ton statuary tribute to women’s suffrage out of the Capitol Rotunda, the marble Portrait Monument will return. The statue of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton was a gift to Congress in 1921 from the National Woman’s Party. But lawmakers removed it from the Rotunda soon afterward and put it in a less-visible spot. “The foremothers are going to the Rotunda,” said Ann Stone, secretary of the National Museum of Women’s History in Alexandria, Va., which waged a four-year campaign to get the piece displayed beneath the Capitol dome. None of the 11 statues and busts now in the Rotunda honor women. Sen. John W. Warner (R-Va.), chairman of the Senate Rules Committee, said that the target date for the move is May 8.

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CANADA CONNECTION: Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy received the news recently that he had been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize by Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.). Axworthy deserves the prize, Leahy wrote the Norwegian Nobel Committee, because of his work in promoting an international treaty to ban antipersonnel land mines. Known best in Washington as an outspoken critic of Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and of the law he sponsored that is intended to punish Canadian and other foreign companies for doing business in Cuba, Axworthy told Canadian reporters that he was taking the nomination by Leahy with a grain of salt. But, he went on, the nomination was a very nice gesture that “shows that Jesse Helms isn’t the only U.S. senator with something to say” about Canadian foreign policy.

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THWARTED SUITOR: You can be the owner of a professional sports team. You can be a newspaper publisher. But can you live comfortably in both skins? Just ask Jack Kent Cooke, owner of the Washington Redskins football team and the Los Angeles Daily News. Cooke--among the best-known figures in Washington--is so unhappy with the Washington Post’s coverage of the Redskins that he has refused to grant interviews to Post sportswriters for six months. Specifically, the popular owner is upset over a Post editorial deriding him for naming the site of his new football stadium Raljon, a combination of the names of his two sons. The paper found it “ridiculously elitist.” Now, the Post sports staff is crying foul over Cooke’s response, in part because a competing newspaper is getting Redskins scoops. When Post media reporter Howard Kurtz asked Cooke about the matter a few days ago, Cooke questioned the purpose of writing about the freeze-out, saying it was like “a thwarted suitor bellyaching to the public.”