TRUE CONFESSIONS ONLY WHEN IT'S CONVENIENT

WASHINGTON -- It was all "very mild and a very long time ago," Michael
Portillo told British journalists as he announced he had engaged in
homosexual acts in college. I am not who I was, the former defense minister
and Conservative Party star assured the nation in so many words.

Confession and redemption have moved from the heart of religion to the
heart of politics. Portillo's calculated admission last week of a sexual
past that he had legitimately refused to discuss previously moves the
politics of pre-emptive redemption across the Atlantic as well.

Portillo, at age 46, is a big fish in Britain. He would doubtless be
Conservative Party leader today had he not been dragged down to defeat in
his home district in Labor's 1997 tidal-wave national victory. He is the
only Tory on the scene given any chance, in a distant future, to oust Tony
Blair.

Portillo's admission provoked a journalistic whirlwind--the Daily Telegraph
had 11 stories in one edition--but drew political shrugs from Conservative
leaders, who said they still support Portillo's return to parliament and to
a senior party role as soon as possible. Commentators in London rushed to
proclaim how open-minded, blase or Europeanized even Conservative-voting
Britons have become over the private lives of their politicians.

Perhaps the reaction to Portillo's limited modified self-outing does
represent a defeat for the fundamentalists who would use politics to
enforce codes of sexual behavior. If so, that is to be welcomed.

But there is also something troubling in the way politicians feel forced to
disown their personal history and experiences to maintain political
viability in this media-driven age of inquiry and disclosure. Instead of
candidly trying to apply what they may have learned from their own
experiences to help ease the plight of others, they see it as necessary to
repudiate what they have done and even who they were.

That seems to me to be the thread that connects the Portillo disclosures
not so much to Bill Clinton's disgraceful effort to wriggle off the
Lewinsky hook of his own making but to George W. Bush's studied vagueness
on questions of youthful drug use. Portillo and Bush ask their socially
conservative parties for a tolerance that they--and their parties--have
been generally unwilling to provide to others.

Politicians also deserve second chances, when they have not done
irreparable harm through their errors. But the political art of constant
personal reinvention is too frequently a matter of tactics, not salvation.
This pushes our leaders to grant themselves pre-emptive redemption for
whatever may emerge in the future about their past.

Portillo emphasized that he has been married for 17 years in a union that
British newspapers represent as a happy and successful one. He practiced
the Tory version of "family values" in past campaigns. Moreover, when he
was defense minister in John Major's administration, he opposed allowing
homosexuals to serve in the military and he opposed lowering the homosexual
age of consent to 16 from 18.

"The fact that I did not allow my youthful experiences to overrule my
judgment as defense secretary is not to me hypocrisy," Portillo said,
defending himself against the kind of double-standard accusations that have
been leveled against Bush in his front-running campaign for the Republican
nomination.

The Texas governor has owned up to a past of heavy carousing. He has
responded to unsubstantiated suggestions of drug use by indirectly denying
taking cocaine within the past 25 years. His admission of having been
"young and irresponsible" carries his appeal for pre-emptive redemption.

But as governor, Bush "slashed prison drug-treatment programs, increased
criminal penalties and placed hardships, such as losing welfare benefits or
driver's licenses, upon those who abuse illegal drugs," Christy Hoppe of
the Dallas Morning News wrote last month. Prisoners jailed for drug abuse
went from 17,087 to 28,636 in Bush's first four-year term and today account
for 25 percent of the prisoner population, up from 1 in 6 before Bush.

The lack of compassion for others that Portillo on his side of the Atlantic
and Bush over here have shown in their studied mea culpas is troubling.
They have locked the trunk that holds an unuseful past and thrown the key
away. The message is they were not permanently stained, or damaged, even if
others were, and they will talk about their past experiences only to
explain why they are not relevant to their candidacies today.

Today's ravenous and scolding media culture may make it impossible for
working politicians to do otherwise. But this is a loss, for them as
individuals and for us as a society.