AND THE WINNER IS . . . GEORGE W. BUSH

A bump in the road, a setback, a boon to his primary opponents? Puh-LEEZE!
The people who dourly predicted dark consequences from George W. Bush's
"mishandling" of Snortgate were the same geniuses who predicted Bill
Clinton's imminent demise 20 months ago. After the avalanche of insinuations
that the Texas Governor might have used cocaine and is now engaged in a
cover-up, Mr. Bush is in fact, in the words of his campaign adviser Ralph
Reed, "better off" than he was before the firestorm started. Far from
bungling his first encounter with adversity, the front-runner handled it
like a master.

Sure, his convoluted answers to the cocaine question were Clintonesque --
you need a Palm Pilot to chart the chronology of his non-drug use -- but the
political dividends have proved Clintonesque in a positive sense. Mr. Bush
has enjoyed an "uptick" in the polls, as Mr. Reed described it. He continues
to best Democratic adversaries by double digits and swamps his closest
Republican rival, Elizabeth Dole, by a factor of four.

This is true even though most voters with an opinion on the subject believe
that he is guilty as rumored of the alleged felony -- just as most voters
judged President Clinton guilty of non-felonious adultery from the outset of
Monicagate. Yet no one cares. Only 11 percent in a CNN/Time poll feel
cocaine use disqualifies Mr. Bush from the Presidency. More revealingly, the
number of people who think a candidate should not even respond to questions
about cocaine has gone up since the marathon cross-examining of Mr. Bush began.

Does this mean that Americans have once again proved themselves to be
morally bankrupt, as was widely proclaimed last year? Has the rise in the
Dow Jones average since then made them overlook hard drugs as well as
reckless sex? If the Dow hits 13,000, could a politician suspected of grand
theft auto run for President without fear of public condemnation? At 20,000,
a serial killer?

No, but what this fracas did prove is that the best place a candidate can be
in 2000 is in opposition to the fulminating moralists in public life,
whether those of the press or of Mr. Bush's own party. Bill Clinton's
bipartisan legacy is this: Given the choice between scolds and scamps, the
country opts for scamps. The more the media pile on a politician over a
private sin -- let alone a sin for which there is no evidence or
accusations, despite major investigative efforts by both The Washington Post
and The Wall Street Journal -- the more the public will rally around the
targeted candidate. Just prior to the last push to bust Mr. Bush for drugs,
there was a mini-storm in which our Puritan tribunes reprimanded him for
using a four-letter word repeatedly in an interview in Talk magazine; that
may have helped his poll numbers too. Should someone now come forward and
actually accuse him of coke use, he may enjoy a poll bounce analogous to the
one enjoyed by Mr. Clinton after Kathleen Willey appeared on "60 Minutes."

Mr. Bush's tormentors have tried to dress up the propriety of the cocaine
question ex post facto by linking it to his hypocrisy on public policy. As
Governor, he has signed on to Draconian laws in Texas that promote jail for
first-time drug offenders caught in possession of minuscule amounts (though
jail rarely befalls those of Mr. Bush's station, who can afford the right
lawyers). But the many troubling questions raised by this hard line -- and
the failed national war on drugs it epitomizes -- could have been asked of
him before the cocaine rumors flared, whether he's a hypocrite or not. Now
they'll likely be forgotten again, unless or until the questions about his
own cocaine use get a second wind.

Such is our political culture, in which scandal usurps all else, that Mr.
Bush has been able thus far to position himself as a don't-worry-be-happy
candidate, a genial Chauncey Gardiner who seems to believe whatever a
beholder hopes he believes. He has been able to skate by most policy
questions, including those drowned out by Snortgate. Most of the media, for
instance, ignored his response to a query by David Bloom of NBC News about
the Kansas school board's decision to delete evolution from its recommended
curriculum. Mr. Bush fudged it: "It's up to local districts to make
decisions on how to achieve standards of excellence, as far as I'm concerned."

If this is how educational excellence is going to be promoted by a chief
executive -- and the hapless Al Gore, seemingly following Mr. Bush's lead,
is now also waffling on this question -- the policy implications go well
beyond Kansas. How would a President respond to similar political pressures
by creationists that could threaten Federal funding of scientific research
(and academic institutions) exploring the frontiers of biology and medicine?
Will taxpayers have to foot the bill in future welfare programs for
graduates of evolution-free high schools sentenced to the bottom rungs of
the new economy?

Some voters may be less concerned with what drugs, if any, passed through
Mr. Bush's brain than with what other traffic, if any, did. Though otherwise
cooperating with a seven-part Washington Post profile this summer, this
would-be education President would not permit either Andover or Yale to
release his grades. Asked by a South Carolina elementary-school kid at a
campaign photo op this week to name his favorite book as a child, Mr. Bush
responded, "I can't remember any specific books." Amidst all the crackhead
cracks on late-night talk shows was David Letterman's chilling aside, "I
have the feeling that this guy could turn out to be a colossal boob."

The good news for Mr. Bush is that he can deflect his critics for months to
come. Not only can he ignore the scandal obsession of the Beltway media and
capitalize on the national backlash against it, but he can also count on the
abrupt flip-flop of G.O.P. moralists in the aftermath of their
post-impeachment election setbacks. As Senator Robert Bennett, a Utah
Republican, memorably put it -- in a formulation he has since regretted and
then blamed on the movie version of "Primary Colors" -- Mr. Bush will be the
nominee unless "he was hit by a bus or some woman comes forward, let's say
some black woman comes forward, with an illegitimate child that he fathered
within the last 18 months. . . ."

Actually, Mr. Bush may be the nominee even if this scenario does come to
pass. For all the talk about the Governor's alleged hypocrisy, it is nothing
compared with that of some of his supporters. Tom DeLay, the impeachment
ayatollah who saw himself in a war of "relativism vs. absolute values," is
now a born-again relativist, suggesting last week that what Mr. Bush has
"done as a part-owner of the Texas Rangers" matters more than any youthful
felony. Peggy Noonan, who last year inveighed against a President for
prizing winning over telling the truth, has now called upon Mr. Bush to
stonewall and expressed latent nostalgia for "the old tolerance" of "normal
failings." According to the new relativism she posited in The Wall Street
Journal, a sexual fling may be O.K. too, as long as it can be deemed a
romantic "love affair" and doesn't involve a "sick manipulator being
serviced in the hallway."

William Bennett, at least, deserves credit for consistency: he is the only
major Republican to rue (and acknowledge) the news that his party's foremost
champion of moral renewal, Newt Gingrich, carried on extramaritally with a
Congressional aide 23 years his junior. Mr. Bennett has also called upon Mr.
Bush to answer the cocaine question, though with a loophole: Cocaine use is
"a serious matter," but "how serious depends on facts and circumstances."

After two decades of conservative campaigning against the 60's and "secular
humanism" and boomer self-indulgence, what has happened to change the
equation? The virtuecrats have a fresh-faced boomer of their own who might
lead their party back into the White House. "I think we run the risk here of
looking like when it's a liberal Democrat we're willing to be serious about
these things, but when it's one of our own we're going to use a different
standard," said Gary Bauer this week.

But Mr. Bauer, like Orrin Hatch, another G.O.P. Presidential wannabe still
implicitly criticizing Mr. Bush's evasiveness on drug use, is a loser. For
Republicans in 2000, much like Democrats in '92, when Bill Clinton parsed
the Gennifer Flowers questions, winning is everything. And Mr. Bush --
having proved so early that only the despised press will call him on
youthful indiscretions, real or imagined -- emerges from his first crisis in
a position that is nothing if not win-win.