WASHINGTON INSIGHT

NEVER MIND: At a sunny Rose Garden press conference Tuesday, veteran White House reporter Sarah McClendon yelled a question: What did visiting Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chretien and President Clinton think about the increased flow of illegal drugs from Canada to the United States? “It’s more trade,” Chretien responded in chipper fashion. Laughter and baffled looks immediately tipped off Chretien that he had misunderstood the question. “I heard trucks,” he explained, apologizing. Clinton, however, seemed to derive immense glee from another politician’s being caught making a potentially politically precarious pronouncement. “I’m glad we clarified that,” he said, laughing. “Otherwise, he’d have to delay calling the [upcoming] election.”

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CASHING IN: While the Democrats are dialing for dollars to refund controversial contributions to party coffers, Republicans are happily taking the Dems’ “illegal foreign cash” scandal to the bank. Whether it’s the high-wattage rhetoric or the facsimile of an Indonesian 10,000-rupiah bank note that’s doing the trick is unclear, but response to the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s fund-raising campaign has been “overwhelming,” says spokesman Mike Russell. The committee’s debt has fallen from $7 million to $5 million, and its cash-on-hand account has ballooned from less than $100,000 to about $2 million. Central to the pitch is a letter signed by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) that suggests a link between foreign currency and “all the American soldiers who have spilled their blood and sacrificed their lives.”

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POLITICAL SUSPENSE? Mexican Ambassador Jesus Silva-Herzog has won some renown in Washington for his impish sense of humor. In a recent talk with Latin American specialists, Silva-Herzog described his country’s electoral reforms, which may give opposition parties a chance to break the 60-year-old monopoly on power held by the Party of the Institutional Revolution. “It is a very unfortunate system,” said the Yale-educated ambassador, a minister in two PRI governments, “because we no longer know which party is going to win.”

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NO GREAT WALL: Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and her husband, Richard C. Blum, have insisted that they maintain a solid “firewall” separating her role as a supporter of U.S. relations with Beijing and his business interests in China. But evidence of a crack in that wall appeared recently when a Times reporter called Blum’s San Francisco office to inquire about the firm’s overseas business--and was referred to Feinstein’s office in Washington, where spokeswoman Susan Kennedy said she was handling arrangements for reporters to interview Blum. Feinstein, asked if it was appropriate for a government-paid employee to respond on behalf of Blum’s business, explained that her husband was skiing and that his firm has no one to handle “public relations” work. “That is not going to happen as a regular occurrence,” she said.

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NOT COMING TO DINNER: Rosie O’Donnell may be the hottest talkmeister on the tube, but when it comes to her reasons for backing out of the upcoming White House Correspondents’ Assn. dinner, she’s not talking at all. The only thing association president Terry Hunt knows is that O’Donnell left the group “high and dry.” While her cancellation has left many scratching their heads, the late President Richard Nixon would probably understand. In a bitter 1971 memo to top aide H.R. Haldeman, Nixon called that year’s dinner “probably the worst of this type I have attended,” described the audience as a “disgusting group . . . drunk, crude and terribly cruel,” and insisted that “under absolutely no circumstances” would he attend such an event again.