WASHINGTON -- Thanks a lot, Junior.
For a few, brief, shining moments, President-in-waiting George W. Bush seemed to be striking a blow for the majority of the public and the minority of journalists who believe private lives have nothing to do with public character - not in history, not in the here and now.
Bush also seemed to be striking an equally important blow against the very idea of those invasive ''questions'' fed by rumors that self-righteous busybodies and hypocritical character cops use to feed the infotainment machine in the guise of examining qualifications for public office.
But then he blew it.
Instead of standing for a principle on ''the cocaine question,'' Bush caved at the first sign of political trouble, tossed his principle overboard, and morphed into a caricature not worth defending. You can't try to help someone who folds on you.
Not only did Bush flip-flop, he did flip-flops on his flip-flops - and probably isn't done yet. That's a bad enough public display for a president-in-waiting, but nothing exceeds the damage the simple, damning phrase, ''Candidate X later explained,'' can do to someone's credibility, especially in a period when the electorate is just getting to know him.
This isn't even close to political damage, much less anything worse. But it's telling. In presidential preprimary politics, history teaches that you never know when the lights will suddenly go up and the country awaken from its appropriate ennui long enough to take a serious peek at you. That's when you want to be at your best - not caving, flip-flopping, and dissembling.
In Bush's case, much more was at stake than one person's ambition and tactics. He had a chance to stand up against much of what people justifiably hate about both politics and journalism, but he ended up making the game worse.
What's going on - and has been going on with dizzying speed for more than a decade - is a steady plummeting of standards, which has empowered sleaze politics. The most important of the trends has been a gradual easing of the obstacles to floating rumors into the mainstream of campaigns via the press in the complete absence of any direct evidence relating to truth or accuracy.
Rumor had it that a certain newspaper was about to report Mike Dukakis seeking mental health help after his defeat for governor in 1982 ... Newly chosen House Speaker Tom Foley might be gay ... Did George Bush fool around before becoming president? ... Bill Clinton might have tried to renounce his citizenship or played footsie with the KGB in the late '60s ... Unnamed people in raw FBI files suggest the late John Tower was a wild drunk ... Questions raised about the alleged associations of one of Pat Buchanan's associates.
The key common denominator is rumor without directly supporting evidence, yet each drop of poison had its moment in the mainstream simply because the press was willing to lower standards so that a rumor could produce a question that could be dressed up to suggest an answer.
Somewhat unscientifically, I have a short-form description of how this madness has proliferated. I start in my computer's massive press archive, by entering the words ''rumor'' and ''rumors'' and then the date 1980. The result is 32,933 hits.
Change the date to 1990 and the number of hits nearly triples to 88,095.
Then change the date to 1998 and the number nearly doubles again, to 161,400.
Bush could have assaulted this system frontally by sticking to his guns as a mature man who once wasn't, arguing the irrelevance of detail and refusing to play the questions game. He had substantial public support.
But principle was soon unmasked as tactic. Politically, it helped him to say faithful husband and teetotaler, so he did. But then, after asking support for a refusal to talk about drugs in the past in the absence of a single specific allegation, he ditched his position on the fly last week.
Like any pol playing games loosely, he was trapped by his own campaign's stupid failure to check the simple facts of high-level government and White House background checks, which ask about drug use beginning at age 18, leading him to stonewall on a topic he himself put into play.
Worse, he's equated the presidency with a staff job in the White House or a slot at the FBI. The Constitution says otherwise; there's no application form, and it's the people who decide. Benjamin Harrison's life was stable, and Andy Jackson's was a mess. Who was the more effective leader?
Bush has squandered his case with astonishing incompetence. But the more important casualty will be the press's shrinking credibility, and I shudder to think how many hits my computer will get after next year.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
