OBSESSION WITH PAST HIDES PRESENT ISSUES

Bill Clinton famously claimed that he tried marijuana once but "did
not inhale". Amazingly enough this wasn't necessarily Slick Willie's
most preposterous public statement. Years later he would stare into
the camera and intone, "I did not have sex with that woman" when even
a Mongolian goatherd knew otherwise.

(Apparently he was invoking some entirely private distinction between
oral sex and the real thing.)

Later still he stonewalled a grand jury with: "It depends on what the
meaning of the word 'is' is."

The lesson of Clinton's career and enduring popularity would seem to
be that if the public finds a politician attractive and decides he
can be trusted not to steer the ship of state into the proverbial
iceberg, they're not too bothered by whatever low-rent grubbiness he
gets up to in his down-time.

That in turn suggests they care even less about the sins of his hot
and foolish youth.

However, at this point the pundits are reserving judgment on what
impact the revelations of David Cameron's and Barack Obama's teenage
drug-taking will have on their electoral prospects.

Cameron is the leader of the British Conservative Party and, unlike
his hapless three immediate predecessors, someone the British public
might just regard as Prime Minister material.

At Eton he got a severe wigging from the headmaster for smoking
marijuana, but the experience wasn't sufficiently salutary to stop
him further indulging while at Oxford University, coincidentally the
setting for Clinton's mythical feat of self-denial.

Obama, the junior senator from Illinois who this week confirmed that
he's running for president, has admitted using marijuana and cocaine
when he was at high school and in the grip of an identity crisis.

As usual there's more to both furores than was immediately apparent.

Obama actually 'fessed up 11 years ago when an astute publisher
decided there was a market for the autobiography of the first black
person to be elected editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Dreams From My Father details his unusual background - Kenyan father
who returned to Africa when Obama was 2; white Kansan mother; brought
up, largely by his grandparents, in Hawaii - and his struggle to come
to terms with his mixed ethnicity.

Obama's candour has been applauded but it remains to be seen if this
baggage becomes a burden when the campaign gets nasty, as it assuredly will.

The buzz around Cameron is heightened by the fact that he's a toff.
This week the Independent dwelt on his membership, while at Oxford,
of the Bullingdon Club, an exclusive clique under whose aegis
blue-blooded undergrads have engaged in binge drinking and vandalism
for 150 years.

While the story might have helped Cameron secure the football
hooligan vote, its real subject is his social class rather than a
youthful predilection for getting blotto and heaving pot-plants
through restaurant windows.

The implied question was: do we really want this upper-class twit to
be our next Prime Minister?

For those of us who don't share the English obsession with class, the
question is: why do we care what politicians did before they became
politicians?

We don't in relation to judges, school teachers or airline pilots, to
take three professions in which it's arguably more relevant.

Oddly enough this view that our political leaders should have avoided
the pitfalls of youth co-exists with the widespread assumption that
they're all dishonest, inept, parasitic sleazebags whose real
motivation for entering public life is to feather their own nests.
Censoriousness and cynicism make uneasy and illogical bedfellows.

As usual too, the focus on backgrounds and peccadilloes obscures the
real issues. Dabbling in drugs didn't distract these two from their
studies or slow their meteoric rises. In fact, that sense of having
risen without trace is the real question mark hanging over this pair,
both of whom so far seem more about style than substance.

Cameron had been in Parliament for only four years before becoming
leader of a party persuaded by successive electoral calamities that
the essential attribute of a would-be Prime Minister is that he
shouldn't remind people of their dorkiest uncle. A similar notion
seems to have precipitated National's recent change of leadership.

Obama has been a senator for two years. His inexperience may not
matter, for just as "presentation" skills increasingly outweigh
achievement in the appointment process, presidential elections are
usually won by the best campaigner as opposed to the best candidate.

And while editorial writers agonise over whether the US is ready for
a black president, the anti-PC brigade senses a conspiracy unfolding:
if Obama was white, they bleat, his candidacy wouldn't be taken seriously.

Looking at the extremely mixed bag of Caucasians who've occupied the
White House or got within a heartbeat of the presidency (Dan Quayle,
to take one admittedly striking example), one wonders how they manage
to keep a straight face.