THE SUBSTANCE ABUSE WE SHOULD WORRY ABOUT

During the 1988 Democratic primary, after Al Gore and Bruce Babbitt
volunteered that they had smoked marijuana in the '60s, an earnest Dick
Gephardt bounded up to the press in Des Moines to announce that he had done
absolutely no drugs whatsoever, ever.

After a moment of bemused silence, one reporter piped up sardonically, "Why
not?"

We want our presidents to be sentient, but not too sentient. Loose, but not
a goose.

It's time for the yuppie brain-twister again, this time about George W. Bush
and cocaine. If a candidate is from the generation of sex, drugs and rock
'n' roll, how much should he be held accountable for a past of sex, drugs
and rock 'n' roll? In an era of political strip-searching, how much do we
really want to see?

In 1992 Bill Clinton's supporters accused the press of going too far in
pursuing the particulars of the candidate's restless libido, saying it was
in the past and it did not matter. As it turned out, it wasn't in the past
and it did matter. Now those same supporters are goading the media to dig
into Bush's past.

"Sure it's a legitimate question," said the Senate minority leader, Tom
Daschle, D-S.D., when asked if W. should answer the question about cocaine.
Bush has resolutely ducked the issue, saying he won't play the game of
rumor-mongering, even though he has "learned from my mistakes."

Democrats want payback. And Republicans have been throwing stones from glass
houses for so long, they can no longer recognize hypocrisy.

Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich's affair with a young Capitol Hill aide
was an open secret in Washington all during impeachment, and all through his
pompous lectures about America's cultural and moral decline.

At the heart of W.'s campaign is the notion that voters made a mistake when
they turned out his father for a hedonistic Bill Clinton. The Bushes, the
subtext goes, will uphold the moral authority of the White House.

Last year, before he was a candidate, W. told of how troubling the Oval
Office sex scandal was for young people and volunteered that he had been
faithful to his wife, Laura. "In my case," he said, fidelity is an important
prerequisite for the presidency.

But that puts W. in a bind: He stresses some personal history as relevant to
his election, even as he dismisses other personal history as rudely beside
the point.

It's hard to believe he would be so coy about cocaine if he could just say,
in a simple declarative sentence, that he had never tried it. W.'s
Clintonesque evasiveness contrasts starkly with the simple "no" of the 11
other presidential candidates asked.

On CNN last weekend, Rowland Evans asked Bush to say "flatly if these rumors
are or are not true."

"The game of trying to force me to prove a negative and to chase down
unsubstantiated, ugly rumors has got to end," Bush replied, adding: "What
people need to know about me is that when I swear in, I will swear in to not
only uphold the laws of the land, I will swear to uphold the dignity in the
office, of the office to which I had been elected, so help me God."

So now W. is trying to say that the only behavior that's relevant is what
happens after you're sworn in as president. Fine -- except that he's already
boasted that fidelity is relevant before you're sworn in.

The cocaine issue is trickier than the marijuana issue because, as Jesse
Jackson points out, there is a disparity between the way rich kids and big
shots and suburbanites get treated when they are caught with cocaine, and
the way poor people are treated when they get caught with crack.

And as Time magazine notes this week: "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?"

The fuss over a controlled substance is, of course, distracting from the
deeper question of the other kind of substance.

W. is the kind of guy who doesn't want to know more than he has to know --
the president of the fraternity who thought it was not cool to study too
much or work as hard as the geeks in the library.

He seems to have good instincts, and he knows how to get good advice. But
does that qualify him to lead the country? That's the substance abuse we
should worry about.

Dowd, based in Washington, D.C., is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for
The New York Times.