ASHINGTON - As a father, Texas Governor George W. Bush doesn't want his twin, teenage daughters to experiment with drugs. As a son, Bush hated it when a reporter asked his father, President Bush, if he had ever committed adultery.
As the front-running GOP presidential candidate, Bush went through a rough week because those personal considerations have trumped the conventional political wisdom that says Bush should give an unequivocal answer about whether he ever used illegal drugs, according to people close to the governor.
The drug-use question smothered Bush's campaign last week, as reporters tried various tacks to get at the issue. On Wednesday and Thursday, they asked whether Bush could meet the drug-free standards for working in the federal government. Then on Friday, outside a homeless shelter in Akron, Ohio, Bush was asked what anti-drug message he had given to his own children.
Bush said, ''I'm going to leave my daughters out of this campaign,'' but replied that parents have a responsibility to make up for their youthful mistakes by warning their children to stay away from drugs.
''One of the interesting questions facing baby boomers is, have we grown up? Are we willing to share the wisdom of past mistakes?'' the 53-year-old Bush said. ''And I think the message ought to be to all children, `Don't use drugs. Don't abuse alcohol.' That's what leadership is about.''
GOP consultant Ralph Reed said he believes the governor, like many baby boomers, had some youthful indiscretions but did not use hard drugs. Reed said Bush won't respond to unsubstantiated rumors about using drugs, including cocaine, because he is uncomfortable answering personal questions that demean politics and could hurt his family.
''As a father, Bush had told his daughters not to use drugs,'' said Reed, a Bush adviser. ''An awful lot of young people like them are on the cusp of making decisions about their future, and he doesn't want them to say, `The president of the United States did that, so I can do that.'''
Reed said Bush deeply resents that his father was asked in an Oval Office interview if he had ever had an extramarital affair. ''He has an emotional feeling about the undignified way his dad was treated, and he strongly thinks that we are exacting a cost on public servants that is vicious and negative and has gone way beyond the call of duty.''
Still, last week's media drumbeat so rattled his campaign that Bush was forced to shift from his just-say-no stance. In answer to a question Thursday about his ability to pass FBI background checks for drug use, Bush indicated that he had not used illegal drugs at any time during the past 25 years. A day earlier, Bush told the Dallas Morning News he had not used drugs in the past seven years.
''I think he has mishandled the issue,'' said John Zogby, a New York pollster. ''By slowly chiseling away at his hard-line position, it looks like he is doing a kabuki dance around the truth.''
But polls show the public is almost equally divided on the issue of whether a candidate should disclose past cocaine use. In a new Time magazine poll, conducted Thursday, 49 percent of the respondents said yes, and 48 percent said no. When the respondents were asked if cocaine use in his 20s would disqualify Bush from the presidency, the results were more lopsided: 84 percent of the public said no; 11 percent said yes. (The poll had a margin of error of 3.3 percentage points.)
''I don't think this is going to hurt Bush,'' said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political scientist at Claremont Graduate University. ''Not only is the electorate sort of fed up with this line of questioning, but it doesn't think the issue of drugs should be dredged up if it doesn't interfere with public service.''
Still, analysts said this is not a risk-free strategy for Bush. First, he may be cast as a hypocrite for stressing moral responsibility in his campaign and at the same time refusing to answer some, but not other, questions about his own values. Bush has been frank on the issue of adultery, saying he has been faithful to his wife, Laura, and about alcohol, admitting he gave it up at age 40.
Another risk, said William Kristol, editor of the conservative Weekly Standard, is that Bush will face serious consequences, and a media ''feeding frenzy,'' if he discloses or evidence surfaces that he once used hard drugs.
''I am as sympathetic as anyone to the notion that people deserve a zone of privacy and the right to say `none of your business,''' Kristol said. ''But using cocaine is a felony, a matter of criminal law, and even if it was a long time ago, the questions still will come: `Did you buy it, did you sell it, were you toking off every night?'''
In the Time poll, 35 percent of the respondents said they thought Bush had used cocaine at some point in his life, 18 percent thought he did not, and 47 percent said they weren't sure.
''What never ceases to amaze me is the degree to which politicians don't understand that the public is forgiving of mistakes, but not of coverups and lies,'' said L. Brent Bozell III of the Media Research Center, a conservative media watchdog group. ''Bush should have come clean with an answer and told the truth. Now he has dug himself into a hole.'' Bozell has endorsed publisher Steve Forbes for the GOP nomination.
As the week drew to a close, Bush acknowledged that there wasn't anything uplifting about the last few days.
''I've learned that politics can be unnecessarily ugly,'' Bush said in Akron, ''and I'm trying to purge the system of ugly politics.''
