orry, Mr. Vice President, but news of George W. Bush's drunken driving is going to backfire on you next Tuesday.
The only thing the electorate is more tired of than this campaign is scandal coverage that treats a 24-year-old DUI arrest by a now-teetotalling presidential candidate as a ''bombshell.''
Funny how Bush's arrest record surfaces five days before the election. In Maine yet, a swing state edging toward the Texas governor. From a Democratic activist no less, a former candidate for governor and a delegate for Al Gore to the party's convention in Los Angeles last summer. Nothing suspicious there.
You don't have to be a Republican to be slightly sickened by the smell of Democratic desperation. Whether Gore's campaign operatives or a party freelancer released Bush's drunken driving record is really beside the point. The very act plays right into the vice president's greatest vulnerability: the perception of friend and foe alike that Gore would do or say anything to win the presidency.
This development, in fact, should be more disheartening to Democrats than Republicans. The Texas governor successfully innoculated himself against this issue months ago when he acknowledged that he had a problem with alcohol in his youth. Borrowing the tactic of the nonspecific confessional perfected by Bill Clinton, Bush acknowledged during the primaries that ''when I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible.''
Bush might well have had a more protracted adolescence than most people, but his decision to skirt the details of his past drinking episodes is reminiscent of nothing so much as Clinton's handling of rumors in 1992 that he was a serial adulterer. Before a national television audience on ''60 Minutes,'' Clinton acknowledged only that he had ''caused pain in his marriage.''
The media might underestimate the intelligence of the average American voter, but these presidential candidates did not. The voters knew what Clinton was telling them then and what Bush has been telling them all year: Bill cheated too much and W. drank too much. Primary voters decided in 1992 that if Hillary didn't care, they didn't care either. Primary voters decided this year that if Bush stopped drinking on his 40th birthday, as he has repeatedly declared, his youthful excesses were irrelevant to his current campaign.
Bush might have spared himself this late-season distraction by making public months ago the details of this arrest, but his explanation, that he had chosen to remain silent on the particulars because ''as a Dad, I didn't want my girls doing the kinds of things I did,'' will resonate with plenty of Baby Boomer parents who have withheld details of their own youthful experimentation from their teenage children.
Tom Connolly, the Maine Democrat who released news of Bush's drunken driving record to a Maine television station, would have us believe he was doing a public service by bringing the Labor Day weekend arrest of the then-30-year-old Bush to light. ''The fact that he's been deceitful, that's what the story should be,'' an agitated Connolly shouted at reporters on Friday who were inquiring about his own motives at an impromptu press conference on a Portland sidewalk.
One suspects that Connolly lost his campaign for governor of Maine because he never learned a fundamental political truth: Voters do not like being told what they should think is important. Most have some faith that they can figure that out on their own.
The voters on Tuesday will decide which story is more important to them, the decades-old arrest of the son of a prominent Maine Republican family or a last-minute smear by a Democratic presidential campaign that is desperate not to lose. It's Al Gore, not George Bush, who should hope that this story fades fast.
Eileen McNamara's e-mail address ismcnamara@globe.com
