Democratic Leadership Council

Alton McClain Scarborough will sing in the starring role tonight when "Leader of the Pack" opens at the Theater on the Hill, Western Maryland College. She's a Baltimore native and former member of the singing group Alton McClain and Destiny, which split up in the early '80s when Alton began singing gospel music. She's married to Skip Scarborough, a Grammy Award-winning writer of soul music.Show times are 8 tonight, Saturday night, July 1-3 and 8-10. Ticket cost $8 to $14 and can be reserved by calling (410)

Atlanta -- Language update: It is no longer hip to refer to taxpayers as ''taxpayers.'' Now they're ''customers.'' Government provides its customers with ''services,'' and what it has lacked up to now is a system of ''quality management.''No one has as yet suggested that an IRS auditor be referred to as a customer service representative, but you get the drift.This new jargon was much in evidence last week when Vice President Al Gore met with a hundred or so Atlanta-based federal workers for a town-meeting-style session on government waste and inefficiency.

Washington.--In 1984, an MIT economist named Martin Weitzman published a short book called ''The Share Economy.'' The book made a new argument for an old economic reform, profit-sharing.Partisans of profit-sharing had traditionally argued that if workers have a stake in an enterprise, they will be more productive. Mr. Weitzman advanced a more ''hard-boiled'' rationale. He claimed that profit-sharing was nothing less than the solution to the riddle of how to achieve full employment without inflation.

In selecting California Rep. Leon Panetta as his budget director, President-elect Bill Clinton demonstrates that he really meant it when he campaigned as a different kind of Democrat, one who's skeptical of many of the usual liberal panaceas for the nation's economic ills and who's serious about cutting the budget deficit.Mr. Panetta's appointment increases the odds that the new administration will avoid overdoing the pump-priming measures that could trigger inflation.The 54-year-old Mr. Panetta has himself never fit the mold of a traditional liberal Democrat.

WASHINGTON -- If you want to understand the Clinton administration, you had better learn to speak its language.And the best way of doing that is to read a book being published today by the Progressive Policy Institute, the Washington think tank that is the intellectual wellspring of the "new Democrats" pouring into town next month.The book is called "Mandate for Change," a title unashamedly based on the conservative Heritage Foundation's "Mandate for Leadership," which outlined the parameters of the supply-side policies introduced by the Reaganites in 1981.

We reject both the do-nothing government of the last twelve years as well as the big government theory that says we can hamstring business and tax and spend our way to prosperity.-- Democratic Party Platform, 1992 This remarkable statement, which is due for formal approval at the Democratic National Convention this week, shows how much the party is shedding old liberal orthodoxies and moving right and center with the nomination of Bill Clinton for president and Al Gore for vice president.

WASHINGTON -- The slow-starting Democratic presidential campaign picked up momentum yesterday as Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, a leader of the moderate wing of the party, announced that he is forming an official exploratory committee -- a step toward a formal declaration of candidacy.Mr. Clinton also resigned as chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate-to-conservative elected officials concerned that their party has been taken over by liberal special-interest groups.

Manchester, N.H.-- TOM HARKIN practices the politics of absolution. He is telling his fellow Democrats that they have no reason to feel guilty about their liberal traditions."

Don't look now, but those brain-dead Democrats may be regaining consciousness.According to conventional wisdom, the Democrats haven't a chance of winning the White House in the foreseeable future because their candidates have nothing to say to the average voter. The party's only strategy seems to be divine intervention: pray silently that some calamity will befall the Republican president before election day.It's true that many Democrats are already looking for the miracle that will unseat George Bush next year, if their recent, somewhat excessive excitement over the president's health and the "Quayle factor" offer a clue.

CLEVELAND -- Centrist Democrats searching for a more "mainstream" message for their party unexpectedly turned up a potential new presidential contender yesterday: Sen. John D. (Jay) Rockefeller IV of West Virginia.After a speech at the Democratic Leadership Council's annual convention here, Mr. Rockefeller, 53, disclosed that he was reconsidering an earlier decision not to run in 1992."I'm looking at the situation," he told reporters. "The door is a little more open to me."Also addressing the meeting of moderate-to-conservative Democrats were otherpresidential possibilities: Tennessee Sen. Albert Gore Jr., Virginia Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, Missouri Representative Richard A. Gephardt and former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, the only announced candidate.