WASHINGTON INSIGHT

NO FAN OF BILL: Passing through Washington this week to celebrate the opening of the Academy of Leadership, an institute at the University of Maryland, Pulitzer-Prize winning historian James MacGregor Burns offered an acerbic review of President Clinton. Burns, renowned biographer of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy, described Clinton “as an experiment in a president doing lots of little good things. . . . The question is a philosophical question: Do you get through endless incrementalism the kind of progress you need?” Burns predicted the answer is probably not. “I will guess historians will look on this as a rather vacuous period,” he said.

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TWO VIEWS OF 2000: Backers of Vice President Al Gore’s prospective presidential candidacy see an upside to speculation that House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) might also seek the Democratic nomination. As their thinking goes, a Gephardt challenge would help discourage other Gore rivals from entering the race. But advisors to the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who ran in 1984 and ’88 and is pondering another try for the White House, take a different view. They reckon Gephardt’s candidacy would divide the party’s establishment forces, bolstering Jackson’s chances of making a dent with his appeal to insurgents. As one member of Jackson’s inner circle put it: “By running, Gephardt would lower the threshold Jackson has to reach to be taken seriously.”

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STUDY BREAK: The Senate campaign fund-raising probe, which ended its public hearings last week, can claim at least one casualty. No, the Governmental Affairs Committee did not make an open-and-shut case that Clinton or Gore violated election laws. But the panel may have created a different sort of legal woe for former Democratic National Committee finance director Richard Sullivan. The aspiring lawyer halted his preparation for the North Carolina bar exam in July to appear as the committee’s opening witness. Eager to hear Sullivan’s insider view of the sloppy DNC fund-raising shop, senators thanked him for taking a study break. Sen. Robert Torricelli (D-N.J.), downplaying Sullivan’s revelations, told him that “the principal damage done by your testimony” was that it reduced “your chances of passing the bar exam.” As it turns out, Torricelli was prescient: Sullivan recently received his failing grade in the mail.

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SAY AGAIN? Perennial Democratic financial angel Walter Shorenstein raised a few eyebrows with a recent choice of words. The San Francisco investor was one of about 50 fat cats who shelled out $50,000 each last weekend to talk policy and politics, play golf and tennis, and dine and dance at an event with Clinton and Gore at the Ritz Carlton on Amelia Island, Fla. At the Friday night kickoff to the festivities, DNC Victory Fund Chairman Dan Dutko introduced Shorenstein, the evening’s first speaker, as a man who “never said no” to an urgent fund-raising request. “It’s a good thing I’m not a female because I’d be pregnant all the time,” Shorenstein cracked to a mix of laughter and groans. One loyal Democrat later remarked: “That sounded like something a Republican would say.”