FEEDING FRENZY: As detail after salacious detail...

FEEDING FRENZY: As detail after salacious detail about the alleged sexual relationship between President Clinton and former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky has saturated the airwaves and print media, few characters in the unfolding drama have taken a harder hit in public opinion polls than the nation’s broadcasters, reporters and editors. But the more high-minded members of the Fourth Estate have been quick to defend their honor, noting the important legal, political and constitutional aspects of the story. On Tuesday, however, the behavior of some reporters had more in common with a seventh-grade boys’ locker room than the White House briefing room. Asked how the White House was dealing with “the allegation that . . . the president is simply seeking to distract attention from his own problems by going to war against Iraq,” Press Secretary Mike McCurry called the charge “fallacious and ill-begotten.” In response to McCurry’s innocent use of an adjective that resembles a term for the sex act Lewinsky has reportedly said--and also denied--that she engaged in with the president, ABC News correspondent Sam Donaldson and others collapsed into fits of sophomoric giggles.

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GIVE ME A T! Demonstrating the courage to face the final free-trade frontier, Commerce Secretary Bill Daley announced in a speech at Harvard University on Tuesday that the Clinton administration will take the issue directly to the nation’s high schools and communities. “We need to take on the critics of trade more forcefully,” Daley said, explaining the administration’s latest effort to win the president the “fast-track” authority to negotiate trade agreements. To reach critics of free trade--who apparently lurk in the nation’s high schools--the administration will expand a program aimed at training high school teachers to teach about trade issues and create a community-outreach effort to emphasize the role of trade and exports in the nation’s economy.

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FAN CLUB: The dozen peach roses sent to Rep. Loretta Sanchez (D-Garden Grove) last week after the House Oversight Committee dismissed the election contest that could have ousted her from Congress were not from her husband. They were not from a constituent. They definitely were not from Sanchez’s defeated foe, former Rep. Robert K. Dornan. They were from one Gerald Hawes of Oakland, who’d monitored Sanchez’s 14-month ordeal--floor debates, press conferences and all--via C-SPAN. “Please do not consider this a sexist gesture,” Hawes wrote on the card.

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STILL DISSING BUSH: Former President Bush’s 1990 decision to revoke his read-my-lips pledge not to raise taxes doomed his reelection chances and turned the hero of Desert Storm into an also-ran. And now that the federal deficit is vanishing, Clinton gets most of the credit. Even most GOP leaders claim that it was Reagan’s 1981 tax cut, not Bush’s tax hike, that led to the new era of budget balance. Of course, Bush might be getting more credit if he hadn’t later chickened out and dubbed his own decision a mistake.

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FACE TIME: Last week’s congressional vote to rename Washington’s National Airport after Reagan has further inspired the folks at Americans for Tax Reform, a conservative group that unabashedly idolizes the nation’s 40th president. The group’s Grover Norquist, who came up with the airport idea after discovering that only 11 publicly owned facilities are named for Reagan, now wants to have Reagan’s face chiseled onto Mount Rushmore.