D.C. REVELING IN CABINET GUESSING GAME.

Byline: Elaine Sciolino The New York Times

Webs of intrigue are spun with the thinnest of threads. Banal encounters become fierce lobbying campaigns. The words and deeds of the heirs apparent and of their supporters and detractors are analyzed with the vigor once invested in the ranking of Soviet septuagenarians.

With President Clinton off meeting Asian leaders in Manila, the foreign policy establishment at home is playing its parlor game du jour - guessing who will replace Warren Christopher as secretary of state - with feverish intensity.

Even Henry Kissinger got into the act the other day, when he was asked to discuss the various candidates.

``Am I out of the picture completely?'' deadpanned the former secretary of state, national security adviser and plotter nonpareil. ``I'd like to serve with a president who also speaks with an accent.''

Clinton has not made up his mind, White House spokesman Mike McCurry insisted before he left for Asia to meet up with the president's party Friday.

Probably the clearest indication that the contest is far from over is that the new White House chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, was asking lawmakers for their opinions as he made his courtesy calls on Capitol Hill this week.

``You've got to go out and take the temperature out there,'' McCurry said. ``Inevitably that leads to more speculation.''

Experience shows that with Clinton, it is not safe to predict a decision of this kind until he makes it, and sometimes not even then.

Clinton was poised Nov. 15 to announce William Cohen, the outgoing Republican senator from Maine, as his new secretary of defense, said a senior White House official who spoke on condition of anonymity. But the investigation of Cohen's background was incomplete, and Clinton had last-minute questions about how Cohen would fit in with the rest of the national security team that he was still assembling.

In one of their many recent late-night conversations, Vice President Al Gore advised Clinton to wait. The White House official paraphrased Gore as saying, ``Look, if you're not comfortable that you're there yet, don't rush a decision you'll have to live with for years.''

That sort of uncertainty has only encouraged the spinners and speculators.

``What's amazing is how people's prospects allegedly rise and fall on no actual real event or single bit of evidence,'' said William Kristol, the conservative editor of The Weekly Standard, who once advised Vice President Dan Quayle. ``Those who are involved in the grubby business of domestic politics are used to intrigue, speculation, knives in the back, trial balloons, killing with kindness and all of that. What makes this kind of comical is that people who move in the allegedly staid and dignified world of foreign policy are trying to play this game.''

Indeed, the unnamed White House official who was quoted in a Washington Post article the other day as calling Madeleine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, a ``second tier'' choice may inadvertently have boosted her chances.

White House officials quickly said that Clinton, whom women favored by 17 percentage points over Bob Dole in the election, was upset by the remark. Representatives of 60 women's groups used a previously scheduled meeting with Gore to register their outrage.

``We told him there was a pattern that was developing in which not enough women's names were being brought forward,'' said Anita Perez Ferguson, president of the National Women's Political Caucus. ``The comments about Madeleine were not appropriate at all, given all her expertise, her readiness for the position.''

Gore assured the women that Albright was a leading contender, and suddenly senior White House officials began mentioning her name again in the same tier as the three other leading candidates: George Mitchell, the former senator from Maine and Democratic majority leader; Sam Nunn, the outgoing Democratic senator from Georgia, and Richard C. Holbrooke, the former assistant secretary of state, who helped negotiate a peace agreement for Bosnia.

Within the American Jewish community, there was a rising sense several days ago that Mitchell had a lock on the job. The evidence: He requested a private meeting with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel lobby.

On Nov. 12 the organization assembled some of its top officials, including the chairman of its board of directors, Steven Grossman, who came to Washington specifically for the meeting, and its president, Melvin Dow, to brief Mitchell on the Middle East.