Presidential Politics

Boston. -- The young woman on the Wellesley campus had just one question for Hillary Clinton -- and no, it wasn't that question. ''Why don't you run?'' the undergraduate asked the alumna as the audience broke into applause.Hillary Clinton, class of '69, political-science major, Yale Law School graduate, has the sort of resume that you often find at the ballot box. So do many of the other wives of presidential candidates this year. The women could form an entire law firm: Clinton, Harkin and Tsongas -- with an office left over for Marilyn Quayle.

The on-again, off-again anchor team of Catherine Crier and Bernard Shaw is back together again starting today at 4:30 p.m., as CNN launches "Inside Politics '92," a daily half-hour program devoted to presidential politics."

Paris. -- Surely I am not the only one to feel shame at the mixture of grovel and bluster with which President Bush has approached Japan? Can one imagine any past American president dealing with a foreign power in quite this way?Unfortunately Mr. Bush is not unrepresentative of current attitudes in the Congress and in American business. Japan is held on the one hand to behave unfairly on trade, but on the other is begged to limit its competition with the United States and to grant exceptions for American inadequacies and the American failure to produce products able to successfully compete with those of Japan.

AT A DEMOCRATIC National Committee meeting in Los Angeles lastweekend, presidential candidates tried out the messages they will be delivering on the campaign trail.Sen. Paul Tsongas said, "if we turn our back [on women, blacks and the economically destitute] and become Republican wannabes, we don't deserve to be elected."Absolutely right! The Republicans don't deserve to be elected. That's why they are so successful in presidential politics! Deserving has nothing to do with it, to paraphrase Mae West.

Washington. -- The Clarence Thomas contretemps inaugurates the post-civil rights era. The primary significance of the Thomas nomination is its merely modest significance: it does not matter mightily to the course of the Supreme Court, and the court matters decreasingly to the solution of serious social problems.Never before has there been such a disproportion between the controversy surrounding a judicial nominee and the probable consequences of his confirmation. Of the Supreme Court's 64 decisions last term involving substantial written opinions, only 11 were by 5-4 votes.

MANY POLITICAL pundits have expressed grave concern because here it is August, but only one Democrat has flung himself into the presidential meat grinder.They point out that by August in past campaigns, hordes of candidates and their media gurus were stomping through Iowa, looking for farmers willing to share a 10-second TV bite with them.But now only Paul Tsongas, a former senator from Massachusetts, has declared his candidacy. (Mike Dukakis? Ted Kennedy? Now Paul Tsongas? Has Massachusetts become the prankster state?

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 other presidential 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 Tsongas, the only announced candidate.

WASHINGTON -- For as long as there have been national governors' conferences, the chief topic of corridor conversation usually has been presidential politics. Those who weren't themselves running were always willing and eager to talk about those who were, or should have been.That, however, was before the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf and the governors, like Congress and the American people generally, fell in line behind the American troops in the field, if not always behind President Bush's policy of impatience with economic sanctions that put them there.