WHITE NOISE

WASHINGTON -- During the 1988 Democratic primary, after Al Gore and Bruce
Babbitt volunteered that they had smoked marijuana in the 60's, an earnest
Richard 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 W. 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 George W. Bush's past.

"Sure it's a legitimate question," said the Senate minority leader, Tom
Daschle, when asked if W. should answer the question about cocaine. Mr.
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. 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's of the 11 other Presidential candidates asked.

On CNN's "Evans, Novak, Hunt & Shields" show last weekend, Rowland Evans
asked Mr. 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," Mr. 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 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.