IS NOTHING PRIVATE?
Candidate Bush Is Trying To Avoid Questions About
Drugs. Good Luck

When it was reported that Senate minority Leader Tom Daschle told a
gaggle of Washington reporters he thought George W. Bush had the right
to refuse to answer questions about his long-past personal behavior,
including inquiries about whether he ever used cocaine, the cheers
went up. "Right, just leave him alone. Who cares what he did when he
was young?" Or, from the Governor's boomer cohort: "Who didn't try
drugs back then?"

It's easy to understand the forgiving impulse of the Governor's
contemporaries, who themselves don't want to be permanently
disqualified. And it's not hard to comprehend a national
disinclination, post-Monica, to paw over the dark moments of yet
another politician's life. The problem is that using cocaine, unlike
having a bit of sport with the ladies, is illegal, and the country has
decided to dole out harsh prison sentences to many people caught with
the drug.

America survived and prospered for a couple of centuries without knowing
absolutely everything about its Presidents. Full disclosure was prevented
both by the discretion of the perpetrators and by a fairly rigid sense of
restraint on the part of the Establishment press. For example, when James B.
("Scotty") Reston, the Washington bureau chief of the New York Times, found
out that one of his reporters was looking into rumors that John Kennedy had
been married to another woman before Jackie, he stopped the investigation.
Said Reston: "I will not have the New York Times muckraking the President of
the United States."

Before Washington journalism turned into blood sport and politics
turned into an exercise in serial lying, there was a fairly firm
understanding by the press that personal failings were none of the
public's business unless misbehavior affected the performance of
public duties. Because there was so little competition, the press
barons could enforce those rules. No more.

Yet there is a national longing to return to the good old days when
political news was more about issues and policies, and less about
private lives. Could there be a set of guidelines governing both press
coverage and the terms of political engagement? How about a statute of
limitations for past misdeeds? Maybe any act committed before the age
of majority should be off limits. Or could misbehavior that violates
no laws and harms no other person be declared out of bounds for scrutiny?

This all sounds reasonable enough, but it's hard to imagine that some
parts of the press wouldn't continue to ask the questions and that
some parts of the media wouldn't rush to report the answers,
believable or not. Soon it would be everywhere. The rationale for
probing has only grown easier in this post-ideological period, since
so many politicians are essentially saying "Elect me because I'm the
better person." Is there not then a compelling need to know just how
good a person that politician is? Is he or she a hypocrite?

Which brings us back to George W. Bush. Surely few care that he may
have had a wild youth, if that means he dated many women or drank too
much from time to time. But what about the illegal use of cocaine?
Tens of thousands of Americans are serving mandatory jail sentences
for having been caught with cocaine or its variant, crack. If Bush did
try cocaine, how does that square with his support of Texas
legislation putting those caught with less than a gram of the drug in
jail?

A young man asked Bush during a campaign event in Iowa recently
whether the candidate had used cocaine. Bush said he wasn't answering
that sort of question. The questioner then asked whether candidates
should be disqualified if such use occurred. Bush said no, "if they've
learned their lesson." O.K., but what about the people in jail who may
have learned their lessons?

There may be only two practical ways to deal with the question of
privacy for candidates, and neither relies on the self-restraint of
the press, since that is a forlorn hope. The first is the "let it all
hang out" approach, in which the candidate answers every question,
truthfully, and relies on the good sense of the people to weigh the
importance of what is disclosed. There is good reason to believe,
post-Clinton, that we have arrived at a time in which the public can
sort out what's important and what is merely embarrassing. Do most
candidates have that sort of trust in the American people? Bill
Clinton certainly didn't, devising an impressively precise series of
half-admissions that allowed him to get elected twice.

The second approach is to say nothing about the sins of the past, and
to let the public decide whether the stonewall is covering up some
egregious mistake or is rather a healthy assertion of political
privacy. This seems to be George W. Bush's current strategy, at least
on this question. He has been quick to deny any marital infidelity and
to admit earlier excessive drinking. It might be nice to think that a
politician can decide where to draw the line on political privacy, but
Bush is being naive if he thinks his silence will stop the questions.