DID THE YOUNG BUSH HAVE FUN?

You Betcha, and Most Voters Forgive Him

Hate Him If You Will, but Not for the Gossip About Pot and Coke.

Like a cloud of pot smoke, allegations of past drug use have hung over
George W. Bush for years. In Kitty Kelley's new book on the Bush
family, they are even extended to the saintly Laura, who is reported
to have sold a few dime bags in her college days. Odds are there is
some fire where there is so much smoke, yet the issue has never gotten
any traction with voters, and I think I know why.

Anyone old enough to have misbehaved in the 1960s and '70s is also old
enough to remember that President Nixon went to China in 1972. The
conventional wisdom about that trip was that only a Republican who had
trained under Sen. Joe McCarthy could make such a historic gesture
without being branded as "soft on communism."

A similar analysis, I fear, applies to recreational drug use. Only a
Republican with a headlock on the religious right could admit what
people already know: that most college-educated baby boomers tried
drugs and maybe even enjoyed them.

George W. has not confessed this in so many words. But no less a
paragon of family values than Barbara Bush told an interviewer in
1999: "Do I think he had a lot of fun at college? You betcha he did.
You should work very hard at everything you do, but you also ought to
have fun in life. He had a lot of fun, I imagine." (And if Barbara has
any trouble imagining exactly what went on in Yale fraternities in the
'60s, I'm sure many people would be glad to enlighten her.)

A Democrat would never dare to use that word - fun - in those
circumstances. When pressed about past drug use, Democratic
politicians clutch at the handy euphemism "I experimented" with this
or that - the implication being that the experiment failed, was never
repeated and is now deeply regretted. Bill Clinton was ridiculed for
adding that he "didn't inhale" (though my guess is that he didn't -
not everyone liked marijuana). But give the guy a break. Most
Democrats have offered some version of the same defense: Yes, I tried
drugs, but, trust me, I didn't have any fun. To admit anything more
risks being saddled with all the baggage of the culture wars:
liberalism, free love, feminism, you name it.

I don't want to argue that drugs are harmless. They have filled our
prisons, corrupted our allies and ruined lives. But I'm not sorry to
see youthful drug use by someone who has clearly moved on in life lose
its juice as a campaign issue.

Those of us who did inhale in those years know that neither indulging
nor abstaining was a very good measure of character, intelligence or
any other trait pertinent to the presidency.

George W. Bush is a liar, a hypocrite and a global menace, but not
because he allegedly smoked some dope at Yale or tooted some coke at
Camp David.