Pubdate: Sat, 28 Aug 1999 Source: Miami Herald (FL) Section: Living & Arts Copyright: 1999 The Miami Herald Contact: One Herald Plaza, Miami FL 33132-1693 Fax: (305) 376-8950 Website: http://www.herald.com/ Forum: http://krwebx.infi.net/webxmulti/cgi-bin/WebX?mherald Author: Leonard Pitts Jr. SLEAZE WE WANT, SLEAZE WE GET Maybe I can save us all a little time. Here's a questionnaire for future presidential aspirants: Are you now or have you ever been a user of recreational drugs? Are you now or have you ever been involved in an adulterous relationship? Are you now or have you ever been a cigarette smoker? Tax cheat? Bed wetter? Any candidate who answers yes to one of the above questions would be remanded to the custody of federal marshals. In case you haven't figured out yet where I'm going with this, here it is in words of one syllable: Cut George some slack. George W. Bush, I mean. Seems like lately, ol' Gee Dubya can hardly poke his head out from behind his money pile without somebody asking him if he's ever used cocaine. After first steadfastly refusing to respond to the question, the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination has begun dribbling out bits and pieces of an answer. No drug use in the last seven years, he said. And then: none in the last 25. The D.C. press corps and the political foes of George W. Bush are smelling blood. Both statements, of course, fall far short of full denial. So naturally, the Washington press corps and Bush's political rivals are smelling blood. Meantime, party poobahs are begging him to come clean. And me, I'm just sitting here shaking my head at the silliness of it all. I'll grant you, it's difficult to feel a lot of sympathy for Bush. Indeed, at one level, it's possible to argue that the question of drugs is a fair one, given that the candidate himself has, for political purposes, trotted out information on both his marital fidelity and his past heavy drinking. Having declaimed so freely on those intimate topics, Bush seems disingenuous at best in piously insisting that an inquiry about drug use is out of bounds. His silence leads to the unavoidable impression that he's a guy with something -- a coke pipe, perhaps? -- to hide. The lack of answers only fuels the demand for them. I buy that argument as far as it goes. Problem is, it doesn't go far enough - -- not nearly -- to erase a nagging sense that this line of inquiry ultimately says less about Bush than it does about the news media. In other words, the folks who first posed the question and now keep it in the headlines. To date, there's no hard evidence -- none -- to suggest that our George used coke during his long-ago youthful revelries. And even if there were, I'm at a loss to understand what this would say about the sort of president he might make someday or even the sort of man he is right now. I can't see where the public interest is served here. Heck, as near as I can tell, the public has no interest. I mean, nobody's talking about it in the checkout line at my market. How about yours? And if the inquiry has no bearing on anything of substance, if the public has no burning desire or need to hear an answer, then the question begs a question: Why? Why are we asking this? The answers, unfortunately, are myriad. We're asking because Richard Nixon lied and connived and stole from us the ability to unquestioningly trust. We're asking because Gary Hart's brazen sexual hypocrisy opened the door for public investigation of private lives. And yes, we're asking because Bill Clinton's behavior killed the last taboos, made it seem as if there was no longer any question too probing, too private, too lowdown, nasty and rude, to ask. So we're asking. But in the asking, I think, we become part of the problem we purport to abhor. Meaning the rising tide of sleaze in American culture. That tide has fed the creeping tabloidization of news media so that trivialities and titillation now fill pages and broadcast space we once reserved for news. It should be our mission to arrest -- not advance -- that trend. And if this is sometimes impossible, so be it. If news -- real news -- occasionally requires digging through trash then fine, dig we must. The problem is not that we sometimes get dragged through sewage by the news. The problem is that too often it gets dragged there by us. Leonard Pitts Jr.'s column runs in Living & Arts every Thursday and Saturday. To call Pitts, dial 1-800-457-3881. Please dial 1-800 even if you live in South Florida. - --- MAP posted-by: Jo-D