Given his questionable past morals, I'm sure George, Jr. will use a snorting straw instead (see below) :-). If George, Jr. has any spine at all, he will admit that he's done lots of drugs, knowingly violated the law and remove himself from the race.
It will be fascinating to see the Christian Coalition/right wing Repubs lose their soul and suck up to the party boy/coke head George, Jr. after their endless bashing of Clinton for his moral failings. The height of hypocrisy.
Again, I ask (without response), who will be the Repub nominee after George, Jr. resigns after his numerous skeletons in the closet are revealed? It seems McCain is being groomed for VP to try to placate the right wingers.
____________________________________________
May 14, 1999
Behind Rumors About George W. Bush
Lurks a Culture of Washington Gossip
By ELLEN JOAN POLLOCK
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
It was at a dinner party in San Francisco several weeks ago that attorney
E. Bob Wallach picked up the rumor about Gov. George W. Bush of
Texas. A woman asked her fellow guests if they had heard about the
governor and drugs. Another guest piped up that the drug in question was
cocaine. "Everyone at the table had quote 'heard,' " says Mr. Wallach. But
nobody, he says, offered a shred of proof.
Neither, so far, has anyone else.
Yet the rumors persist. They have bounced from the Washington, D.C.,
party circuit to the fledgling primary campaign in New Hampshire and
ricocheted all the way to Mr. Wallach's nonpolitical gathering on the West
Coast. A gossip-circuit favorite: that Mr. Bush, the top contender for the
Republican presidential nomination, bought coke on a Washington street
corner and was high at his father's inauguration.
"I vacillate between being infuriated and wanting to
laugh," says conservative TV commentator Mary
Matalin, who worked closely with Mr. Bush on his
father's 1988 presidential campaign. "It is so not
true."
How does she know? Ms. Matalin was at the
inauguration and spent much of her time with Mr.
Bush, whom she calls Junior. "We were together
the whole thing," she says. "I had to go to every
single Bush event. It was awful. Dresses,
pantyhose -- it was my worst nightmare."
Clay Johnson, a college friend of the governor and his director of
appointments, says that he, too, spent time with Mr. Bush at the
inauguration, "so I know firsthand that's not true."
Rumors abound, as well, that Mr. Bush used cocaine as a young man.
Never mind that the governor's pals from Yale College and Harvard
Business School and his pilot chums from his stint in the Texas Air
National Guard say they never saw him touch the stuff. Never mind that his
associates from the oil business, baseball and politics also say they saw no
signs of drug use.
Mr. Bush, 52 years old, has acknowledged that he had his wild moments
as a youth. He has said that he used to drink too much and then stopped,
but he has declined to answer questions about drug use. "When I was
young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible," he has said.
To be sure, no one would expect Ms. Matalin or Mr. Johnson to admit
readily to drug use by Mr. Bush. And the campaign season is in its infancy,
so evidence of personal shenanigans or worse could still emerge about Mr.
Bush or any other candidate at any time. But the rumors are so
widespread that some people might reasonably believe that drug use by
Mr. Bush would be relatively easy to document. That is not the case. Right
now, even people spreading the rumors admit they have nothing to back
them up. Dozens of people who know Mr. Bush well were interviewed for
this article, as were many other people who have told the drug stories at
parties, workplaces and political gatherings. None provided evidence that
Mr. Bush ever used drugs -- and many expressed the strong belief that the
rumors are false.
"These could be vicious rumors. They probably are vicious rumors," says
one Republican, after enthusiastically running through a catalog of Bush
gossip. "I don't even know why I'm passing it on."
Not too many months ago, decrying the so-called politics of personal
destruction was very much in vogue among political types. But as this
round of presidential politics grinds to the starting line, dirt-mongering
seems to be getting a jump on primary season. Rumors of President
Clinton's womanizing were pervasive among political cognoscenti early in
his first campaign, but they didn't break through into the general public's
consciousness until some semblance of proof -- Gennifer Flowers -- made
the news.
Not so this time. At least 37 newspapers and magazines have run articles
and editorials gingerly raising the drug issue, mostly by noting that Mr.
Bush declines to answer questions about drug use or other youthful
misdeeds. "Doonesbury," the comic strip, has portrayed him dodging the
drug question. ("Um ... gotta run," says his character when asked in
"Doonesbury.") The political ramifications of his possible drug use have
been debated on CNN and CNBC.
Then there's the rumor that there is a photo -- out there somewhere --
depicting the governor in his younger days dancing naked on top of a bar.
The photo has been written about in the Star tabloid, and its existence has
been hinted at on the Internet. The gossip is so prevalent that Dorothy
Koch, the governor's sister, even raised the possibility with their mother,
former first lady Barbara Bush, of releasing naked-baby pictures of her
brother, Ms. Koch says. "We all think it's hilarious," says Ms. Koch.
Jay Leno has made a national joke of it on the "Tonight Show." "Did you
hear what his excuse was today?" he asked his roughly six million viewers.
"He said it was casual Friday." Meanwhile, no such photo has been
published, and no one has come forward claiming to have it.
Suzanne Garment, author of the book "Scandal: The Culture of Mistrust in
American Politics" and a longtime Washington observer, says the cocaine
rumor is so pervasive that she doesn't even remember where she first
heard it, except that it was "political people, none of whom claim firsthand
knowledge. They just sort of mutter 'cocaine.' We're very used to thinking
that our leaders or would-be leaders have some terrible or dirty little
secret. So when somebody tells us what it is, or sounds like it is, we're
very disposed to believe it," she says.
It is impossible to pinpoint where the Bush gossip started. Many people,
including Bush loyalists, believe much of it emanates from the political
camps of his potential primary opponents. Some have put years into
running for president, only to see Mr. Bush, who has yet to hit the
campaign trail, breezing past them in the polls.
David Carney, a Republican political consultant in New Hampshire who
worked for the senior George Bush but hasn't signed on with a presidential
candidate, says he has heard the drug gossip from operatives working for
Bush opponents including Steve Forbes and Lamar Alexander. They don't
pass on hard information, just raise the drug question, he says. They are
trying to "slow down the momentum [of the Bush campaign] by spreading
these rumors," he says.
Mr. Bush, he points out, "hasn't stated any new positions, so it's hard to
disagree on a philosophical basis and build your network of support on
philosophical grounds. So I think the supporters of the other camps are
trying to raise a doubt saying he may look good, but watch out. He may
have problems."
Bill Dal Col, Mr. Forbes's campaign manager, says it is "absolutely" not
true that the rumors are coming from his campaign. "It's a standing rule," he
says. "No backbiting or rumor-mongering about each other or other
candidates. Anyone found violating it will be terminated." Brian Kennedy,
Mr. Alexander's national political director, says that he had received a call
from a senior staffer working for Mr. Bush complaining that Alexander
operatives were gossiping about Mr. Bush and drugs. After calling his
office in New Hampshire, Mr. Kennedy says he "found no basis to
conclude that in any systematic way anybody in our campaign was
spreading rumors about the governor."
The rumors got a solid shove from a Democrat, Lanny Davis, the former
White House special counsel who practically lived on cable TV defending
the president during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Appearing on
MSNBC on the day that Mr. Clinton testified before the grand jury
investigating the matter, Mr. Davis listened to a clip of Mr. Bush criticizing
the president.
"I was in college with George Bush Jr.," Mr. Davis said. "And if we start
seeing smug, sanctimonious comments from political officials, especially
Gov. Bush, throwing stones in glass houses, I think everyone is going to be
at risk."
Mr. Davis now says he "had nothing in my mind to base it on." During the
commercial break, the show's host told him he was going to ask him to
back up his statement about Mr. Bush. "My gut reaction was you made a
mistake and you've got to correct it now and you can't wait for more than
five seconds," Mr. Davis says. Back on the air, he says, "I admitted I just
lashed out because I was under stress.
"What is interesting is how many people wanted to believe that I did have
something on George Bush and didn't believe me when I denied it," Mr.
Davis says. During the next two or three days he received about 200
phone calls asking him to reveal what he knew. Half, he says, were
reporters, one from Japan. The rest, he says, were just "average people."
'We Won't Tell Anyone'
Recently, Mr. Davis spoke to a group of about 100 large contributors to
the Democratic Party in Maryland. At one point, a participant asked him
to tell them about Mr. Bush. "Tell us what you have," Mr. Davis says he
was asked. "We won't tell anyone." Mr. Davis says he told the story of his
MSNBC appearance. Then he asked the audience a question: If he did
have dirt on Mr. Bush, something that wouldn't impede his ability to govern
but that potentially would put Al Gore in the White House, would they
write a check to pay for commercials publicizing it? He says that
three-quarters of the audience either raised their hands or nodded.
Historian Alan Brinkley, a professor at Columbia University, says that Mr.
Bush's problem may be partly of his own making. "When you go from
being completely unknown to being the front-runner in the space of about
six months, you've got to fill in the blanks or people are going to do it for
you, and people are doing it for him in ways that he's not going to like," he
says.
When recently asked whether he had ever used marijuana or cocaine, Mr.
Bush responded, "I'm not going to talk about what I did as a child." What
he "did 20 or 30 years ago," Mr. Bush said, is "irrelevant."
Karen Hughes, his spokeswoman, says that the governor did a "few"
things "that he's not proud of today." He doesn't want to enumerate them,
she says, because he wants to send a "clear and consistent message to our
children: Don't abuse alcohol, don't abuse drugs."
Fueling Speculation
"The governor is not going to engage in the politics of trying to disprove a
negative," she says. "Today you try to disprove a negative and tomorrow
it's another rumor. It's another innuendo. He's not going to play that gotcha
game of American politics."
In some circles, Mr. Bush's refusal to make a specific denial, while
acknowledging some sort of youthful indiscretion, is only fueling
speculation. "The difficulty with that response is that it keeps the issue
alive," says Tom Pier, a veteran of Democratic political campaigns and
currently communications director for San Francisco mayoral hopeful Clint
Reilly. "The failure to answer the question gives the issue currency," he
says. "That question will continually be asked of you through the duration
of the campaign. It leads to a credibility issue for the candidate."
Meanwhile, the gossip swirls. A member of a foreign-policy think tank in
New York heard the rumor from a colleague in Los Angeles. "Not that
she'd believed it, but she heard it," he explains. A media-company
executive says he wanted to catch up on the gossip because "people talk
about these things and I'm always in the dark." He approached a
better-connected acquaintance on the air shuttle between Washington and
New York and asked, "What the hell is it?" he says, "And they said,
'cocaine.' "
'Currency of the Realm'
"Gossip is the currency of the political culture in Washington. It doesn't
have to be true," says Ms. Matalin. "Everybody is a gossip. I dare say
there are people who don't have a bone to pick but are still gossiping
about Junior, because it's the currency of the realm. It makes them look
like they're in the know."
People who actually might be in the know say they are mystified. Those
who have known Mr. Bush through the years produce plenty of evidence
that he has impressive partying skills but no evidence that he used drugs.
Clark Randt is now a partner at the law firm Shearman & Sterling and was
once upon a time social chairman of the fraternity that Mr. Bush led. He
happily confesses -- his term -- to downing a few beers with the governor
during their Yale days in the 1960s. But when it comes to Mr. Bush's
doing drugs, he says, "heavens no."
"We lived for Saturday night," recalls Mr. Randt, who is no longer close to
Mr. Bush. "Saturday night was party night and it was rock 'n' roll, rhythm
and blues, dance music and drinking beer. People think there must have
been drugs; in four years at Yale, there must have been some. I never saw
any. We drank a lot of beer but nothing more than that."
Then there's Harvard Business School: "Chewing tobacco. That was
disgusting enough," says classmate Tom Riley about Mr. Bush. Mr. Riley,
a Silicon Valley executive who is raising money for the Bush campaign,
says he "would be shocked" if Mr. Bush had used drugs. "There would
have been plenty of opportunities with the two of us for me to have seen it,
but I didn't."
Between Yale and Harvard, Mr. Bush lived for a time with Donald
Ensenat, now a New Orleans lawyer. Coke? "It never was around in those
days," he says. Pot? "It wasn't a blip in our existence. I knew people who
did. We didn't." Alcohol, he says, "was big." He remembers occasional
excesses, "but it was nothing chronic or a problem. We had a lot of fun."
Ted Collins, an oil executive in Midland, Texas, who did a little business
and socializing with Mr. Bush, says he "never thought George was that
wild. I'd see him at parties but he was always very well-behaved." Surgeon
Charles Younger, a longtime friend of Mr. Bush in Midland, says when the
governor drank he would occasionally become a little boisterous, "just like
anyone else would. You do get a little out or a little happier." Drugs?
"None of our group did any drugs."
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