Pubdate: Sat, 05 Oct 2002
Source: Globe and Mail (Canada)
Page: F2
Copyright: 2002, The Globe and Mail Company
Contact:  http://www.globeandmail.ca/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/168

Author: Doug Saunders

WHAT DO YOU DO WITH A PROBLEM LIKE NOELLE

Florida Governor Jeb Bush's tough stand against drugs suddenly isn't so 
tough when it comes to his 24-year-old coke-addicted daughter, reports DOUG 
SAUNDERS.

Is there a different standard of justice for the First Family? Apparently, yes

By DOUG SAUNDERS

The great paradox at the centre of America's ruling dynasty was ripped open 
last month when a telephone rang at the Orlando police station. With this 
one call, the libertine, individualistic side of Bush's America was forced 
to stare in the face of its rigidly puritanical and moralistic alter ego.

The call was from the Center for Drug-Free Living, a residential 
rehabilitation program for Floridians charged with drug offenses. "One of 
the women here was caught buying crack cocaine tonight," the caller 
complained. "And a lot of the women are upset because she's been caught 
about five times. And we want something done because our children are here, 
and they just keep letting it slip under the counter and carpet . . . They 
said, you know, because it's basically Noelle Bush . . . She does this all 
the time, and she gets out of it because she's the Governor's daughter."

And, the caller didn't need to add, the niece of the president of the 
United States. Noelle Bush, 24, could not have picked a more significant 
moment to get busted. Only hours later, the polls would open in Florida's 
Democratic primaries, in which voters would decide which candidate would 
challenge Ms. Bush's father in his re-election bid. Jeb Bush was due to 
make a press appearance that morning, and he was effectively ambushed by 
the drug scandal involving his daughter, who had been arrested for 
possession in February.

How could Jeb Bush respond? A devoutly ideological religious conservative, 
he had run for election in 1998 on an anti-drug platform, vowing to get 
tough and put people in jail. He was a central figure in a morally 
conservative movement, now headed by his father, whose central principle 
was that the moral decisions of individuals -- especially those involving 
sex and drugs -- deserved to be met with the harshest and least forgiving 
consequences.

Now his principles were being tested. Ms. Bush is a deeply troubled woman 
with a long history of heavy drug use; when she was picked up in February 
with illegally prescribed Xanax (a tranquilizer popular with heavy cocaine 
users), she had an empty and beaten-up look. Over the summer, she was 
caught cheating on her rehabilitation, and spent three days in jail.

Ms. Bush had seemed poised to begin a successful life, after following the 
old Bush family pattern of getting into youthful trouble. She had studied 
art and graduated from a Tallahassee community college in 2000, but was 
mostly known there as a party girl. Since 1995, according to state records, 
she has received seven speeding tickets and been involved in three 
automobile crashes.

In January, she had dropped out of Florida State University to begin a 
promising job with a software firm. Then she was caught impersonating a 
local doctor in an effort to calm her cocaine-related anxieties with Xanax.

After last month's relapse, Jeb Bush responded as most parents would. "This 
is a private issue, as it relates to my daughter and myself and my wife," 
he told reporters. "The road to recovery is a rocky one for a lot of people 
who have this kind of problem."

 From any other father, these would sound like compassionate and 
common-sense remarks. For Jeb Bush, the past few days have turned those 
words into political dynamite, smashing his electoral lead in this 
Republican-heavy state so he now teeters a few points from defeat. Why? 
Because those words contradict the values that he, like his brother George, 
had made part of his campaign: Drugs are not "a private issue." Drug users 
do not get a second, or third or fourth, chance. Drugs are a criminal 
matter, not a medical problem.

Ms. Bush has become a Republican policy experiment. "Unfortunately," her 
lawyer, Peter Antonacci, said this week, "the policy debate of treatment 
versus incarceration is being worked out with a famous person in the middle."

In the past few days, Floridians have been quick to notice that the Bush 
family's own policies differ from those it imposes on its constituents. 
"Noelle Bush and her parents, in their private capacity, have been let down 
by a system that Governor Bush, in his official capacity, also has let 
down," wrote Jac Wilder VerSteeg, a conservative writer with the Palm Beach 
Post.

By this, he was referring to Jeb Bush's cutting of funds to the very rehab 
program his daughter is attending, and to the Governor's aggressive 
boosting of tough-on-crime programs that sent more drug offenders to jail, 
rather than to treatment. Democrats and their supporters leapt on the 
Governor, accusing him of hypocrisy. Arianna Huffington, a national 
columnist, wrote of "Jeb's wildly inconsistent attitude on the issue -- 
treatment and privacy for his daughter, incarceration and public 
humiliation for everyone else."

The Los Angeles political writer Jake Tapper provided the ultimate Democrat 
gloat, comparing the Bush dynasty to the Democrats' own messed-up first 
family: "It's these Bushes with whom the current crop of Kennedys must be 
compared."

When he first ran for office four years ago, Jeb Bush made it known that he 
was the most right-wing and inflexible of the Bush men, a strict 
conservative who would not give in. "I won't bend on my principles," he 
said. "Those principles come from moral beliefs. I'm not going up there to 
get along. I'm going there to shake things up."

Now, thanks to Ms. Bush, Jeb Bush has found himself having to bend on his 
principles, to question his moral beliefs, to get along. In the midst of a 
tight election campaign, this has proven perilous.

America's fundamental contradiction -- a deep intolerance of vice, combined 
with an obsession with vice like no other country -- had found its center 
in the ruling family. George W. Bush had managed to steer around this 
contradiction by converting to born-again Christianity in the 1980s, 
placing a wall of piety between his dissolute, booze-and-drugs years and 
his rigid politics. George's daughters, Barbara and Jenna, did not escape 
notice for their serial underage drinking. George's brother Neil drew 
little fire last week when he divorced his wife of 22 years (a no-no in 
many Republican circles). But Ms. Bush's indiscretions struck too close to 
basic Republican values to go unremarked.

She is exactly the sort of drug user whom the Republicans have targeted. In 
1980, 40,000 Americans were imprisoned for drug possession; by 1999, as a 
result of the new laws of Ronald Reagan and George Bush Sr., that number 
had jumped to 453,000.

Indeed, the George W. Bush administration has tried to demonize drug users, 
putting anti-drug advertisements on prime-time TV after Sept. 11 that made 
the preposterous claim that Americans who buy drugs are helping finance al 
Qaeda's terror attacks. Jeb Bush has not been asked whether he believes his 
daughter has lent support to terrorism.

When the President's brother ran for governor in 1998, he talked endlessly 
and aggressively about drugs. "The drug problem is a quiet poison in our 
communities," he said in one debate, shortly before promising to triple 
anti-drug spending and to appoint a retired U.S. army colonel to the 
position of Florida drug czar. "We need to use the laws of the state and 
toughen them up so then when drug traffickers sell drugs and poison our 
young people, they're put in prison for a long time."

After that debate, Jeb Bush answered a few questions from reporters. What, 
one asked, were his motives for the tough-on-drugs programs?

"Most of the joy I've ever had, and almost all of the trauma, is related to 
being a father," he said, quietly. "And that is what this is all about."

At the time, most people took this to be an empty platitude, a bit of 
campaign-trail sentimentality. This week, the people of Florida know what 
trauma he was speaking of, and they know that its name is Noelle.

Doug Saunders writes on foreign affairs.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom