BUSH STUMBLES AS MEDIA SNIFF SCANDAL

The dissection of personal scandals has become as intrinsic to United States
presidential campaigns as bumper stickers and corporate finance, and so it
was last week that the 2000 campaign began in earnest with a storm over what
had or had not been up George W Bush's nose.

The issue is cocaine this time. Had it been sex again, it would arguably not
have won so much attention from a public sated by Bill Clinton's Oval Office
escapades. For the time being at least, drugs are more politically
interesting than sex.

Marijuana is no longer a problem. Clinton claimed he had smoked but "didn't
inhale", which nobody believed, though that did not stop him winning the
presidency. Al Gore, the likely Democratic nominee this time, admitted 11
years ago that he had smoked pot, and most Americans still think he is stiff
and boring.

Cocaine is another matter. Using it is a serious crime, punishable by a
prison term -- especially in Texas under Bush's governorship, where
possession of even a gram could land you in jail. So if it turned out that
Bush once tried it, there is a hypocrisy charge lurking behind the questions
of morality and criminality.

The cocaine question emerged out of the haze enveloping his Texas bachelor
days in the 1960s and 70s, when he was, by all accounts, a party animal. He
boozed and went out with a lot of women, but it is unclear what, if any,
drugs he took.

The affair brought the media pundits and the pollsters back to familiar
ground - the struggle between the personal and the political. Clinton pushed
the frontier back by winning the impeachment battle in the Senate and in the
public arena.

But the Bush cocaine furore has demonstrated that the matter is unresolved.
The frontier has not held, and his attempt to draw a line in the sand failed
to stop scrutiny of his past.

The stone-walling platitudes - such as "When I was young and irresponsible,
I was young and irresponsible" - that got him to the governor's mansion in
Austin are not good enough to get him to the White House. That is a rockier
road, guarded by more ferocious watchdogs.

The Bush privacy defence worked for the first few weeks. He presented
himself as a prince who had learned from the mishaps of youth and was now
ready to assume the throne. The nature of his past mistakes was therefore
irrelevant.

But the strategy fell apart on the campaign trail, largely because of Bush's
mishandling. First, he volunteered the fact that, unlike Clinton, he had
been faithful to his wife, thus putting the character issue on the table. It
was open season on his private life, and the press wanted to know what other
sins could Bush swear he had not committed. All other 11 Republican
candidates in the presidential race had had no hesitation in denying any use
of cocaine, unlike the well-financed front-runner.

Then, when Bush was on the road last week without his chief media adviser, a
reporter asked whether he would be able to pass the FBI background checks
required for government workers, which demand a seven-year drug-free period
before employment.

It was a relevant question to anyone seeking public office, Bush reasoned,
so he was happy to respond that, yes, he could pass muster. It probably
seemed a reasonable decision at the time, but it opened the floodgates. The
news lead the next day was that he had not taken drugs for seven years,
giving the impression that before 1992 he had wallowed in a drug-addled haze.

The damage limitation only made matters worse. The next day Bush said he
could not only pass current FBI tests, he could also pass the tests that
were in force during his father's term in office as president, which
required 15 years of clean, drug-free living. In other words, he had not
snorted since 1984.

His aides then pushed the cutoff year back further still, telling
journalists their candidate meant that he could have passed the more
stringent test at the time George Bush Sr was sworn in as president in 1989.
So the new threshold became 1974, when Bush Jr was 28. But the
salami-slicing proved pointless. What about before 1974, came the inevitable
inquiry. Could he swear, like all prospective White House staff, that he had
not touched cocaine since he was 18?

Bush belatedly rushed to lock the stable door, but the horse had gone and
was riding roughshod over his team's efforts to control it. Even though no
shred of evidence had materialised to prove he had taken drugs, it was
widely assumed he had snorted cocaine (otherwise why else go through such
contortions?).

Bush believes he can sit out the storm. He remains in a dominant position in
the polls, where he leads Gore by 17 points. As many as 84% of Americans
questioned on the drug issue believe that a person's cocaine use in his 20s
would not affect his electability. And 58% say the press should not pursue
the matter.

But the public is as confused as its media about all this. A clear majority
believes that Bush should come clean about his drug past. In effect, the
voters are promising him that if he tells all, they will forgive him, just
as they more or less forgave Clinton for his sexual transgressions. Bush's
dilemma is whether to trust them. Admitting cocaine use would be a hostage
to fortune at the start of the Republican primary process, but further
prevarication could remind the electorate of Clinton's weasel way with words.

With a handful of exceptions, those same Republicans who were righteously
indignant about Clinton's moral failings are now most defensive about Bush's
right to privacy, and the need to forgive. Meanwhile those Democrats who
staunchly guarded the border between personal and political during the
impeachment want payback.

Staunch Republicans and Democrats among the voting-age population have
followed suit, backing the person rather than the principle. What counts
seems to be whether the candidate is perceived as "one of us" or "one of
them". That perception in turn is based on policy stands on a range of
issues, from taxation to gun control and abortion. In other words, sex and
drugs may provide colourful battlefields, but the war is fought over the
"real issues", after all.

The Guardian Weekly 26-8-1999, page 6