Bush Shoots Self in Foot With Cocaine Answers

by Christopher Caldwell

He's right of course. But, amazingly enough, New Mexicans still had a lot of attention to spare for the back-and-forth over George W. Bush's cocaine use. From this distance, it looked like two awful things happened to Bush on that front. First, at a succession of press conferences, journalists discovered the logic that would allow them to ask about coke until the cows came home: Just dwell on government drug policy and Bush's standing to administer it. Once they got the hang of this logic, the skill with which they deployed it increased hour by hour.

That spelled the end of Bush's jolly and charming dismissals, like, "When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible." For me -- and probably for most of the journalists trying to grill him into a Pulitzerburger -- that's a fair enough policy. The problem is: That's not the policy of the federal government. No: the policy is to take kids who are "young and irresponsible" and send them to places like the Torrance County Detention Facility.

Bush's campaign spokesman Scott McClellan was resorting desperately to the Nixon-Clinton Re-Ask: "What he may or may not have done in the past is not the question we should be asking," McClellan said. "It is, 'Has he learned from his mistakes?'" Oh, really? Is that the question we ask 19-year-olds caught with a quarter-gram of coke at their sentencing hearings? Has that been George Bush's standard as governor of Texas?

Nothing Bush said was working. "It's important for us to set examples," was a line he tried at one point. "And this kind of collective guilt of Baby Boomers trying to confess on the public altar what they may or may not have done sends bad signals to your children and my children and other people's children." But here the wish was father to the thought. No one was talking about "collective guilt." No one was worried that "The Baby Boom" had tried cocaine.

The second setback, though, was self-inflicted. In Roanoke, Bush engaged the cocaine rumors by saying he could have passed the background check on coke during his father's administration. This turned the speculation into a fun math game that ordinary tv viewers could play. And they did! It was kind of like Bill Clinton's saying, in response to a marijuana question, that he had "never broken the laws of this country," which only sent people to their atlases to plot out the foreign countries where the then-candidate had lived. Suddenly last week, Americans were saying, "Okay, if George Sr. got inaugurated in '89, and if you subtract 15 years, and ..." Really, the only remaining question is just how recently he was leaning over some dirtball friend's glass-top table with a rolled-up dollar bill in his hand.

Bush, particularly at his question time in Columbus, looked like Clinton in stunning ways. It wasn't just his bid to summon Clintonesque powers of evasion merely by invoking Clinton's very own "politics of personal destruction" formula. But also all the tics: The sudden hypertrophy of his Southern accent, that "ah wouldna ... Ahma gwan tell yew..." delivery. The fake, just-thought-of-that giggle. The very slow, continuous nodding, as if to say, "I'm agreeing with myself -- why aren't you?"

Bush has taken the only path possible: If he admits to having done coke, he's dead. But this is the Clintonite path, the path of one who (for whatever reason) cannot give a straight answer. No matter what the polls say -- and they say he's slipping in New Hampshire -- this looks like bad business. Worst for the Bushies is that the Clinton-Gore team is unlikely to declare its solidarity and take pity on a fellow victim of the "politics of personal destruction." Au contraire. One can assume that somewhere in some federal agency's pipeline is a major, newsmaking federal study on "role models and cocaine use," destined to detonate around -- oh, around September 2000 or so.