CALLED TO ACCOUNT BY THE PEOPLE

IT SEEMS that George W Bush, Republican candidate for the US presidency,
cannot tell a lie. He just has a roundabout way of getting to the truth.
The American public, to the Bush campaign team's irritation, has this
uppity way of exercising its democratic rights: it likes to ask people who
want to be president and control the nuclear trigger about their drug use.
"Certainly not since August 1992", was the gist of Bush's first evasive
answer to the people's drug use questions. So we still do not know if he
got a kick from cocaine, only that "when I was young and irresponsible, I
was young and irresponsible".

The more Bush has been asked about his past use of drugs the more peeved he
has acted and the more he has sounded like Bill Clinton saying: "I did not
have sex with that woman." This tap-dancing comes from a man who, as
Governor of Texas, demonised drug users as weak and immoral sinners, best
treated from a jail cell. The press and people have seen through Bush more
quickly on drugs than they saw through Bill Clinton on sex. They feel they
deserve to know whether he, too, has been "weak and immoral" and should
have spent time in a Texas jail.

The irony of his obfuscation is that the Clinton saga demonstrated that
most Americans no longer care about politicians' ribald pasts so long as
they perform well in office. If Bush had been upfront about his past drug
use, the press would not be asking constantly where, when and how he
snorted cocaine. Now his honeymoon as Republican front-runner is over. This
privileged son of a former president will henceforth be required to spell
out what his policies are and what he means by "compassionate conservatism".

Bush and his team have taken to attacking the press for prying pruriently
into his private life. This is ripe coming from a party which wanted to
know about every woman a Democratic president had ever slept or frolicked
with and exactly what he and his lovers had got up to in bedrooms and in
the Oval Office. Sorry, but the Republicans have no more of a leg to stand
on now than Bill Clinton when he caused laughter across the United States
by insisting that the only thing he had ever really sucked on was his
saxophone.