WASHINGTON INSIGHT

THERE’S ALWAYS THE LINCOLN: A day earlier they had been lonely, nostalgia-stricken parents taking their only child to college. But by Saturday, the first couple seemed downright liberated. At a San Francisco fund-raiser for young, hip Democrats, Hillary Rodham Clinton warmed up the crowd for her husband. Saying she and the city’s mayor love to get into “trouble” together, she smiled mischievously and said they surely would do it again. As her husband and Willie Brown chortled in the background, an unusually relaxed first lady added that she wouldn’t try to amend her easy-to-bawdlerize comment because she was sure Brown would be “dining out” on it for weeks. President Clinton, dapper in a double-breasted black suit and electric orange tie, then confessed that he’s “always uneasy” about speaking after Hillary because he never knows what she’s going to say. Wondering aloud how he and Hillary would fill their “empty nest” now that Chelsea is in college, Clinton said he “was thinking maybe I’d get a dog to go with Socks, you know. When I heard Hillary talking,” he deadpanned, “I thought that Willie was going to move in with us.”

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GOING DOWN UNDER: If the Clinton administration does convince Congress to provide it with expedited fast-track trade negotiating authority, it plans to focus largely on global agreements that would lower barriers for specific products, like medical equipment or information technology. But it is also eyeing potential free-trade agreements with several individual nations. Surprisingly, apart from Chile, none of the top targets is in Central or South America--even though Clinton has pledged to achieve a hemispheric free-trade zone by 2005. Instead, the administration is considering potential deals with South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and one nation in Southeast Asia.

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ROLE MODEL? Because of his ability, so far, to survive the various scandals bedeviling his presidency, Clinton is earning a distinction he never sought. He is becoming the patron saint of public figures in trouble. A case in point: Teamsters President Ron Carey, laboring under a cloud because of federal allegations of money laundering in his reelection campaign, was asked at the AFL--CIO convention in Pittsburgh whether the furor might tarnish the luster of the Teamsters’ victory in the UPS strike. Said Carey: “The president has had his problems with fund-raising, but his polling continues to go up.” As do his legal bills.

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PULL THIS: The Senate investigative committee’s campaign finance hearings have won less-than-rave reviews--even from some participants. Last week, Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) compared the proceedings to a tractor pull, “a premier cultural event in the Midwest.” Eventually, he said, the sled-pulling tractor “reaches the point you can’t pull it any further, and it’s just spinning its wheels but still making a lot of noise. And I think that’s about where we are in this investigation.” But freshman Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.) was having none of it. “Let me just say I don’t want these hearings to give tractor pulls a bad name,” he joked.

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ON THE ROCKS: The nation’s oldest registered distillery has filled three wooden barrels with Tennessee whiskey and dedicated them to the Volunteer State’s potential presidential candidates: Vice President Al Gore, Republican Sen. Fred Thompson and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander, who--Jack Daniel’s folks seem to have forgotten--was also their governor for a time. The whiskey will come of age just in time for Election Day in November 2000.