By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

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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