WASHINGTON INSIGHT

WHATEVER WORKS: As recently as 1993, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) was a co-sponsor of sweeping campaign finance reform legislation that would have, among other things, banned “soft money.” Today, of course, McConnell is blocking a similar bill offered by Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.). Why the change of mind? Actually, McConnell confessed somewhat sheepishly, he didn’t really mean it four years ago. “Politics is a team sport,” he said, acknowledging that the bill he supported had “a whole lot of things that . . . I have consistently argued against for 10 years.” But “we needed to have a Republican alternative” to a Democratic reform bill, he said.

*

EASY COME, EASY GO: Lawyers spend weeks preparing Supreme Court appeals, and on Monday the justices went through all 1,559 petitions filed over the summer. By noon, they were done--having voted to hear nine of them. Virtually all the rest will be rejected in a series of one-line orders. The rejection thing seems to be going around there. Justice Antonin Scalia returned to work minus his beard. Too scratchy, he says. And Justice Clarence Thomas has given up cigars. Says he was speaking to schoolchildren about bad habits when one child asked him about his. This should make for more cordial relations with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who had complained about the smell of cigar smoke on the second floor.

*

NO HUBBELL TROUBLE: Alan S. Arkatov, a Los Angeles consultant who gained notoriety for helping arrange two employment gigs for disgraced Bill Clinton confidant Webster L. Hubbell, has been appointed to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. Arkatov has been questioned by officials in Los Angeles and by Whitewater prosecutors in Little Rock, Ark., regarding his efforts to help Hubbell in 1994. Arkatov and his wife, Mary E. Leslie, Clinton’s former top California fund-raiser, helped Hubbell win an $8,250-a-month lobbying stint with the Los Angeles Airport Commission after Hubbell resigned from the Justice Department. Arkatov also has testified that he helped Hubbell get a deal with an L.A. stock-brokerage executive.

*

SINGIN’ THE BLUES: At the root of almost every report about government access gained by a large donor lies this question: Just what was the donor hoping to get? In one case the answer’s in writing. It seems that John K.H. Lee, who unwittingly sparked the current foreign money scandal with a $250,000 donation (later returned) from his South Korean electronics company to the Democrats, enjoys playing the piano and singing, and had hoped to be accompanied by President Clinton on the saxophone. In a November 1996 letter to the president (addressed to “His Excellency”), Lee apologized for any trouble his donation caused and said, “Besides I still have a very strong willingness to have a jam session with you as reported by the Los Angeles Times. It will give me an unimaginable honour.” Although the men have met briefly, there is no record of them making music together.

*

SAFE BET: Sol Price is waiting for his phone to ring. The founder of the Price Club chain has offered to give $100,000 to the favorite charity of the first member of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee who states that he or she has never given access to a contributor. Price, a major Democratic contributor, apparently has been unimpressed by the panel’s campaign fund-raising hearings and their portrayal of the Clinton White House as being for sale to big donors. “He who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone,” Price said in a newspaper ad. So far, no one’s called.