WASHINTON INSIGHT

HUMOR UNDER FIRE: After searching 9 million pages of records and producing 400,000 documents for Justice Department and congressional investigators during the last year, the Democratic National Committee struck back last week by sending out subpoenas of its own. The papers, issued “pursuant to lawful authority” by DNC leaders Roy Romer and Steve Grossman, command Washington journalists to attend a farewell bash for communications director Amy Weiss Tobe. Recipients are compelled to “testify what you may know relative to the subject matters under consideration.” Tobe, the spinmeister extraordinaire charged with containing damage during the Democratic fund-raising scandal, is leaving on Friday to join the White House staff as a deputy press secretary. Perhaps her most memorable quote came in August of last year--weeks before the donations controversy erupted--when she called the idea that party officials had arranged for fat-cat donors to stay at the White House “an urban myth, like the alligators in the sewers of New York. It is just not true.” Tobe has since stopped using that line. Quipped one insider on her job change: “Doesn’t it seem like Tobe is trading temples and teamsters for telephones and tapes?”

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SKELETON IN THE (DORMITORY) CLOSET: A White House announcement on the nomination of Christopher Ashby as U.S. ambassador to Uruguay lists the international banker’s impressive resume--a meteoric banking career in three countries, Marine Corps service in Vietnam, an MBA--but omits one potentially significant qualification: Ashby was young Bill Clinton’s classmate at Georgetown University.

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ON THE TABLE: No word on whether Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Huntington Beach) has a pinched nerve or Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California has a vertebra out of whack. They, along with other members of Congress, were visited last week by some of California’s chiropractors-in-training. But students from the L.A. College of Chiropractic in Whittier, led by student association president Michone Ouellette, were lobbying, not conducting spinal exams on lawmakers. They want health insurance coverage expanded to include chiropractic care.

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ROADBLOCK: When the Senate turns to the highway funding bill, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) intends to offer an amendment to kill an affirmative-action program at the Department of Transportation. His chief staffer on the issue is Hunter Bates, but the senator has another expert--an unpaid, one at that--on the matter: his wife, Elaine Chao, who was deputy Transportation secretary during the Bush administration.

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RAIL-SPLITTER BILL? If historians are still pondering Clinton’s ranking among presidents, at least one prominent American is convinced he rates with the greatest of them. At Saturday’s dedication of the Women in Military Service Memorial, Vice President Al Gore attributed the memorable remarks made at Gettysburg battlefield in 1863 to . . . his boss.

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FOR A SMALL DONATION: Buried on page 45 of the Signals catalog, a wish book for the discriminating couch potato (who favors public television), are a couple of items sure to be big hits at holiday time. Next to the photo of a tastefully embroidered terry bathrobe and towel, the ad copy reads, “So many people have slept there lately that one of them could be you.” The “there” is, of course, the Lincoln Bedroom.