CORNERED, GEORGE W. BUSH FLAILS BUT HE CANNOT CONNECT

"Clintonian" is a word we're hearing a lot lately, and it's being applied
to Republican presidential front-runner George W. Bush, the Texas governor
who cannot say "no" to the question: Have you ever used cocaine?

It's a simple, some would say simple-minded, "gotcha" question that seems
to screen out huge percentages of baby boomers from eligibility for the
presidency. Today it is where the line is being drawn about political
acceptability. Eight years ago, Bill Clinton offered up his infamous
"didn't inhale" excuse, giving his critics not one but two reasons to mock
him in perpetuity: Not only did he smoke marijuana, but he came up with a
lie so lame that he insulted our intelligence. Now, any number of
politicians, including Vice President Al Gore, have admitted trying pot,
and for them that's been the end of it.

Today "W." refuses to lie, per se, but his truth-telling on the subject
sounds a lot like Bill Clinton's depositions in the Monica Lewinsky
scandal. He says he made mistakes, "youthful indiscretions," hoping to get
a free pass from the same electorate that has been endlessly lectured about
Clinton's "youthful indiscretions."

No sale there. Then how about: I haven't used illicit drugs in the past
seven years? It's a standard question on White House job applications. Ten
years? Fifteen years? Right now, we're homing in on W. not using drugs
after 1974, but he won't answer the question: Have you used drugs since the
age of 18? So we seem to have narrowed the window of indiscretion down to a
few years between W.'s 18th birthday and 1974, when he was 26.

By this time, of course, more people have developed doubts about Bush
because of the way he danced around this issue than about what he put up
his nose, as a Democratic consultant observed.

Too bad, because it is only now that Bush is trying to think this thing
through and turn it into a useful public policy discussion, which might go
in quite unexpected directions for him. Yesterday he was lecturing America
on the need to explain to young people that mistakes are mistakes, and that
it is better to avoid making them than to do things the way he did.

That's a start. He might also field some awkward questions about why this
country, and Texas in particular, are eager to jail hundreds of thousands
of people and seize their property for making what certain privileged
people call "youthful indiscretions." Either cocaine use and possession is
a serious crime or it isn't. Young people might also detect a certain
hypocrisy in public policies that demonize drugs as killers and wreckers of
lives, when the top GOP presidential candidate is forgiven by members of
his own party, some of whom wrote those laws.

On the narrow question of personal drug use, Bush is not a hypocrite, and
neither is he a policy wonk, a trait of which he is proud. He may want to
reconsider, and think about entering this discussion as his first foray
into wonkhood. If he survives it, it might do him and everyone some good.