CLINTON TO GORE

President Clinton is publicly backing his veep in the phone-solicitation flap. But that’s not all the president thinks about the Gore situation. He’s sure the press is cutting Gore a lot more slack than they’d ever cut him. And the relatively gentle treatment of Gore happened though the vice president was caught at something unseemly — personally asking for campaign dough — that Clinton hasn’t been accused of (yet). The president, of course, has long been irritated by Gore’s image as a goody-goody compared with his own as a corner-cutter. So unfair! Come to think of it, Clinton’s defense of Gore wasn’t all that ringing: “I thought he did very well and I agree with the statement he made.” At his press conference he defended Hillary’s chief of staff Maggie Williams far more passionately.