What about the old DUH charge?
ROB MORSE / SF Examiner 5nov00

BRING IT on. Let the American people decide which guy we'll be forced to listen to for the next four years.

When I heard that George W. Bush had been arrested for drunk driving 24 years ago, I gave up. This could be the end of a man's presidential ambitions, namely Al Gore's.

A DUI a quarter century ago? Is that all anybody can get on Bush? This is as weak as the rest of the campaign, which overdosed on too many details of prescription drug plans in a very thin bloodstream.

Who cares how much alcohol was in Bush's system one night when he was 30 years old? How much brains are in his head right now? The DUH charge is the big one.

A dead young woman was discovered in Teddy Kennedy's submerged car, yet a few years later Democrats were still trying to draft him for president. President Clinton cheated on the First Lady with an intern barely out of college, and he's more popular than ever.

So we're supposed to care that Bush was driving erratically in Kennebunkport in 1976?

He won the sympathy of beer swillers, tosspots, social drinkers, 12-steppers and forgiving Christians everywhere, as well as all those with blemishes in their pasts who'd like to forget about them. That adds up to 99.9 percent of the electorate, with a 0.1 percent margin of error.

A reporter asked Bush how he thought he could get by without disclosing his DUI arrest. What? Do we have to disclose every dumb thing we ever did in our lives?

This is a really pathetic election, offering a clear choice of pathetic candidates. But I can get used to disliking the president. I already do.

So I've been sitting here thinking of all the presidents I've liked. That adds up to two.

I liked Harry Truman because my parents said he was a good man. I was 5 years old, and we were waving from the side of the road as Truman drove through my home town.

As a 5-year-old, my parents' word was good enough for me. I've liked him ever since, especially after learning about how he created the Marshall Plan to rebuild Europe, integrated the armed forces and didn't take guff from anybody.

Truman wouldn't have thought much of young Bush, and would have said so. He didn't shilly-shally around like Gore.

John F. Kennedy was the other president I liked, largely because we all did. My generation had a giant crush on the guy, who seemed to represent all our hopes but didn't.

Kennedy had no use for the civil rights movement, sent thousands of "advisors" to Vietnam and messed around with starlets using zero foreplay.

In between Truman and Kennedy there was Dwight D. Eisenhower, who supposedly did nothing for eight years. That now looks pretty good considering he could have blown us to kingdom come no matter how we ducked and covered. But his golf came first.

Then there were all those presidents my friends and I enjoyed hating: Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and the elder George Bush.

Who are we missing here? Bill Clinton. How could I forget the Big Creep who won't creep away. Many of my friends love Clinton, but I don't. After a year or two of Bush or Gore, I'll miss him, though.

I hated all those presidents for all the standard reasons. Some were good reasons, like the murderous foreign adventures most of them got us into. Call it an indiscretion of youth (or middle age) but I didn't see their strengths and

humanity.

Carter's weakness was his humanity, of course, but that's another matter.

Johnson posed a personal difficulty in my life. My father worked in government for a while and told me how brilliant and charming he was in person. All I saw was how awful he was on TV talking obvious nonsense about "Veet-nam."

Years later, I heard some great stories from grizzled journalists about how they would roar around drunk in a Caddy convertible with Lyndon on his ranch. I started to appreciate him again.

There weren't any state troopers on LBJ's ranch pulling him over for DUI, and the only people he could kill were journalists. That isn't even a misdemeanor in Texas.

Johnson was nailed on something more substantive, waging a pointless and horrible war under the influence of Kennedy myths and advisors.

Those were the days when the presidents and presidential candidates were pilloried because of real sins, not overindulgences.

A DUI? Can't anyone get Bush on anything worse than that? This guy is stone dumb, drunk or sober, and he may be our next president.

Gore's handlers, on the other hand, probably wish they could find something as colorful as a DUI in their guy's background.

You can take this presidential prediction to the bank, but please be careful taking it to the stock market: Sooner or later we'll hate the next president.

Most of us hate the guy already, whoever he is.