THE BUSH SCANDAL THAT ISN'T

Lack of facts doesn't stop frontrunner from dodging the cocaine question

WASHINGTON - In the already over-heated campaign for a presidential election
15 months away, the frontrunner is drenched in pseudo-scandal.

No one has claimed to have seen Texas Governor George W. Bush use illegal
drugs. No one has alleged they sold him drugs during his self-admitted
tomcat days at college. And no one has even hinted they were there when Bush
snorted or smoked or sniffed anything more than a lot of booze fumes.

The absence of fact has not prevented the American buzz machine from
cranking rumours about his suspected cocaine use.

Dozens of Bush's buddies and business associates have been questioned about
rumours described by some pundits as ``decades-old,'' and no one has
uncovered a granule of illegal stuff. There may still be a pilot from Bush's
stint in the Texas Air National Guard who has yet to be reached, but
national and international media continue the pursuit.

The only nasty habit revealed so far from Bush's college years is chewing
tobacco.

Bush has been forthright about his frat-boy behaviour extending long past
Yale and Harvard. The 53-year-old has not uttered the word ``alcoholic'' in
public, but has long admitted to kicking booze and ``chaw'' after an ugly
40th birthday party hangover.

His dodging on the cocaine question has allowed Jay Leno and the Doonesbury
comic strip to replace their favourite bad-boy target, outgoing President
Bill Clinton.

It helps that this Bush is the namesake son of a straight-laced president
ousted after only one term by a younger, dope-sampling (no inhaling),
draft-dodging, adulterous Clinton.

It also helps that law-and-order Bush won tougher anti-drug laws in Texas,
allowing judges to send more users to prison for increasingly smaller
amounts, thus creating the largest prison system in the nation.

And it helps voters see the darker side of a candidate who has said little
about his public policies - beyond ``compassionate conservatism'' in the
state with the democratic world's busiest execution chambers - but keeps
exploding when questioned about his private life.

Bush is showing more and more evidence of his flashing temper (notorious in
Texas) as he lashes the scandal-starved media for seeking another, bigger
fix now that sex-and-lies Clinton is leaving.

Bush whines about being the victim of the ``petty politics of personal
destruction'' by opponents demanding he come clean about cocaine rumours. He
was the only one of 12 Republican candidates who refused to answer a dope
question posed by the New York Daily News. The other 11 said they had never
used illegal drugs.

Bush refused to answer, insisting he won't engage in the Washington
``Gotcha!'' game that hurt his father (even Hillary Rodham Clinton alleged
the elder Bush had an affair, although this was never proved).

Bush has only himself to blame for this new game of implication politics.
Since his first governor's race in 1994, Bush has taunted voters with his
implied guilt, boasting of redemption and rediscovered Christianity after an
extended adolescence.

``Maybe I did (use drugs), maybe I didn't,'' he teased the Houston Chronicle
in 1994. ``How I behaved as an irresponsible youth is irrelevant . . . What
matters is how I behave as an adult.''

His recent responses on the cocaine issue are even more disingenuous: ``I'm
not going to talk about what I did as a child.''

Added to his most common sputter - ``When I was young and irresponsible, I
was young and irresponsible'' - now is a silly, Nancy Reagan-type warning to
kids to learn from their elder's mistakes because drugs are dangerous.

In this post-Watergate, post-Irangate, post-Sexgate era of so-called
``character politics,'' the governor has happily volunteered his standing on
the sins that sullied Clinton (Bush says he's always been sexually faithful
to his wife; he won't use his twin daughters as campaign props).

It's either the ignorance of the untested or the naivete of the
over-confident that makes this frontrunner insist he'll outrun the cocaine
question. Neither is convincing from the man who brags that he didn't grow
up until hitting that 40th birthday.