You say you

don't care about politicians' personal lives and you wish

the press and opponents would just stick to the issues?

It's an

easy platitude to utter, but a difficult practice to

define.

George W.

Bush apparently developed a strategy for dealing with

personal questions in his presidential campaign by

watching our current president put his family through

agony by lying about the specifics and later being found

out.

How do you

avoid lying about the specifics, and protect your family

members from finding out things they would really rather

not know?

You don't

tell any specifics.

Junior's

strategy has been to admit that he committed

"sins" in his past, he's repentant now and he

doesn't want to talk about it.

It's not

going to work, of course. Media types just love that kind

of challenge, and they have their jackhammers hard at

work in their effort to dig below the surface of George

W.'s cryptic statements.

One

journalist asked him if he has ever done cocaine, and he

refused to answer, saying he didn't want to play "20

questions." Even if he answered "no" to

that one, the questions would keep coming.

How about

marijuana? Had any affairs? On and on. George stuck to

his strategy.

So all day

Sunday the talking heads wrinkled their brows in

conjecture about whether George once did cocaine, and

whether it matters, not once asking themselves if anyone

had presented a modicum of evidence to even make the

question a legitimate one.

The same

apologists who took to the talk shows to denounce all the

digging into Bill Clinton's past came forward to explain

why it's important for George to answer the questions,

and those who had prosecuted the case against Clinton

were there to exhort journalists to stick to the issues

and stay out of personal territory.

Republican

Sen. Orin Hatch from Utah, to his credit, has been

consistent.

He says

George should put all the information on the table and

then move on, the same advice he gave Clinton when the

shoe was on the other foot.

If we take

that tack, probably the best thing to do is have all

politicians tell every sin they've committed when they

pay their qualifying fees, and let that be that.

But it's

really not that simple.

For

example, suppose an office-seeker got married at the

tender age of 21 and had an affair a couple of years

later. It ended after a short time, and the office-seeker

has been faithful ever since.

Why should

that politician be forced to reveal his or her shame to

the world, and thus to his or her family? Hard-liners

will say that when you enter the public arena, you give

up your privacy, and pretty much that's the way it is.

And pretty

much that's why we look at our ballots so often and hold

our noses and vote for "the lesser of two

evils." Many otherwise superbly qualified candidates

look at the gauntlet they will have to run and decide

it's just not worth it, so we reduce our pool of

potential leaders to those who have never committed a sin

worthy of media interest, and those who have but don't

care who knows it.

On the

other hand, there are circumstances under which so-called

"private" sins should not be held private at

all. Bill Clinton is the perfect case in point.

He didn't

just have affairs. He went after women who worked for

him, or wanted to, and he used the power of his office to

cover up his very public illicit behavior... behavior

that not only was immoral, but also illegal.

There are

sins that are none of the public's business, and sins

that are the public's business.

If George

W. used cocaine, it was illegal for him to do so. Does

the public have a legitimate interest in past illegal

activities of candidates? Probably so.

Where I

part company with the media's handling of such situations

is that I don't believe you have a right to ask the

question in public unless you have done some

investigating and have at least some reason to suspect

that this might have happened.

What we

need are more responsible journalists. If they do some

digging and find evidence of an old affair, but there's

no evidence of anything current, or any abuse of office

or sexual harassment, nothing illegal, then they should

let it go.

The

question needs to be tackled in the ethical canons of

journalistic organizations. Public interest must be

defined, and journalists who ask questions at press

conferences without any foundation for them should be

banned from future press conferences.

Will

anything like this ever happen? Your guess is as good as

mine.

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