Bush was feeling his way toward what became the ending and big applause line of his stump speech: “To usher in the responsibility era… to restore honor and dignity to the Oval Office.”
During the primaries, Bush occasionally sounded Clintonian about his past. Last January in New Hampshire, my colleague Howard Fineman and I interviewed Bush aboard his campaign bus. The subject turned to his two college-age arrests, one for stealing a large Christmas wreath from a hotel, the other for ripping down the Princeton goal posts after the Princeton-Yale game. We asked if he had ever appeared in court. “I can’t remember,” Bush said. We found out later from his campaign that the answer was no, but we were struck at the time by the fuzzy response. Here Bush wanted to redeem the baby boomers without first coming to terms with his own baby-boomer past.
It’s this unease with his own life story–not the story itself–that comes to mind as voters sort through how to assess the revelation that Bush was arrested for a third time, in 1976, not as a frat boy but as a 30-year-old under the influence, weaving his car full of passengers into the hedges of Kennebunkport. Had Bush revealed the story a year or two ago, it would have been a nonissue. Almost everyone has something embarrassing in his or her past, and, as we’re finding out again now, the American public is extraordinarily forgiving. But for all the talk of the Oprah-ization of politics, Bush somehow missed this essential element of our media culture. The candidate whose signature line is, “I trust the people,” didn’t trust us to be mature enough to handle this information.
His explanation sounds plausible at first. He says he didn’t want to be a poor role model for his 18-year-old twin daughters, Jenna and Barbara. As applied to the specifics of drug use or excessive drinking, Bush is right. Parents do not have to give their kids chapter and verse of all of their various excesses and mistakes. His instinct here is one that most of us who have kids appreciate.
But arrests are in a different category than simple bad behavior, and Bush seems to have hidden behind his role as a parent. As Katie Couric said on “Today” to Bill Bennett, who was spinning madly for Bush and harming his own reputation for rectitude in the process, “He’s not running for parent of the year.” The man is running for president of the United States, and voters had a right to know many months ago whether their president, as an adult, had been convicted of a crime, any crime.
Which is the worse example to set for one’s children: That you once did something bad that they shouldn’t do? Or that you withheld information that people needed to know? When his daughters apply for a job–almost any job–they will be asked if they were ever convicted of a crime. Some of the forms specify felonies; others are more vague. The application form for high office is not on the vague side.
For instance, Dick Cheney was arrested twice for drunk driving while a college student, a minor matter by any standard. But when President Bush nominated him to be secretary of Defense in 1989, Cheney revealed the arrests. Should the president, to ask a question much heard during impeachment, be held to a lower standard than other government employees? The whole point of the Bush campaign is to start holding the president to a higher standard, which presumably includes a higher standard of disclosure of relevant facts.
In more than 200 years of American elections, we’ve never before had a “November Surprise.” We have no precedent for assessing the damage of new biographical information about a candidate this close to the election. The polls are of little help, because they can’t convey the complexity of how voters internalize the news. When people say they don’t care, are they telling the truth? Maybe. Ross Perot’s endorsement of Bush may help more than this incident hurts, and the anger on the part of Republicans over the timing of revelation could further energize Bush’s base. If Bush gets the votes of everyone who’s hit the road after a few too many, it’s a landslide.
On the other hand, the burden of this election is on Bush. He has to convince the voters why, in an era of prosperity, they must fire current management and try something new. Unlike Bill Clinton in 1992, who did not try to campaign on character, Bush has emphasized it repeatedly as his major claim on power. He and his backers have tried to portray Al Gore as lacking the integrity necessary for the job. They sound more than a little tinny now when they claim that Gore’s exaggerating about his dog and mother-in-law is heinous, but this is irrelevant.
A long-ago arrest for drunk driving does not, by itself, disqualify someone from being president. Nor does covering it up. If Bush were far ahead, it would not doom his chances. But Bush is not far ahead. If he loses, it may be partly because he didn’t think the country was quite ready to come to terms with the excesses of the baby boomers, after all. And Bush himself wasn’t ready, early in the campaign, to “usher in the responsibility era” with a little more responsibility of his own.
