MORAL HIGH GROUND HAS GOTTEN TOO STEEP

OK, OK, we've got it: If George W. Bush hadn't used cocaine as a young
man he would say so, but he won't say so, so he did. Does this matter?

The reasons recited for it mattering are not meritless.

Bush is running as the un-Clinton, a guy who will bring dignity,
morality and good posture back to the presidency, in the service of
which, and himself bringing his private life into play, he crows about
his marital fidelity. His dodge on cocaine --- and his weaselly words
make Bush seem more Clintonlike than not.

(Bush thus joins the lengthening line of glass-house Republican
moralists throwing stones. The most delicious: fallen House Speaker
Newt Gingrich, who apparently was slippin' around while trying to
impeach Bill Clinton for slippin' around. And Newt, unlike Clinton,
may even have Gone All the Way. The GOP is turning into an army
marching on clay feet.)

Bush has also been hell on criminals, dopers especially, to the point
of demagoguery. There is at best a certain awkwardness in firing up a
wrathful law-and-order politics only after your own statute of
limitations has run out.

No one would expect Bush to volunteer to do five-to-10 just for
makeup, but one of Bush's assets for the GOP has been his ability to
attract minority voters. It will not be lost on African-Americans
that, personifying a persistent pattern, here's another rich white boy
getting a bye on powdered coke while their kids are imprisoned for
half of forever for using crack cocaine.

Still, even given all that, the case for caring about Bush's or any
other candidate's distant drug use is made up as much of excuses for
the prurience as of reasons for the information.

The obsession with dogging candidates' every old moral misstep
threatens to reduce the draw for political leadership to a righteous
little huddle of prigs who don't have a clue about how the rest of us
live.

These moral shakedowns are said to be in the service of determining a
candidate's character, but ''character'' deserves a broader assay than
adding up Sunday school demerits.

Is President Clinton's character, for the purposes of governance,
defined just by l'affaire Monica or does his rare political
willingness to stand up to the National Rifle Association count into
the balance?

No, we don't want to turn politics over to those awful hedonists
against whom --- oh, irony --- Gingrich has been warning us. But
voters have far more poise about private conduct than do the
journalistic inquisitors torturing politicians on the electorate's
behalf.

Most shrugged off admissions by Al Gore and --- here he is again! ---
Gingrich that they'd smoked a little Mexican laughing tobacco way back
when. Clinton's sexual incontinence struck most, on unpleasant
balance, as preferable to his tormentors' righteousness.

Something like half of us have done dope. Few of us went to the
nuptial couch virgins. We need to be more wise about, than wise to,
each other.

e-mail: teepencolumn@coxnews.com