The Republicans

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A leading feature in this year's presidential race has been the competitive dramatization of each candidate's concern about the problem of drugs. Border visits with the Coast Guard (to squint suspiciously at fishing trawlers) were alternated with sessions at schools and clinics (following Nancy Reagan's nicely charted rounds). No more enterprising effort was mounted on this front than the Vice President's appearances at Chaffey High School in Ontario, Calif., just before that state's primary. It took the form of three assaults -- a role-playing exercise, a box lunch with students who were addicts or were affected by addiction, and a speech to the student body.

In the first session, George Bush was lectured on the dangers of "enabling behavior," that unwillingness to recognize the signs of addiction by which friends or teachers tacitly condone a pervasive drug culture. Bush, with much prompting from an officious young director of the program, is to enact a teacher's concern for a student who has been nodding off in class. The Vice President, casting his eyes uncertainly to the outer ring of reporters, asks what the other "students" will be doing while he approaches the woman teacher playing the student's role. "They will probably be listening," the director responds. The point is to demonstrate awareness of what is going on, to break the unvoiced conspiracy of acceptance. Bush and the "student" wince toward each other asymptotically, oozing what the one hopes is concern and the other hopes is deference. "Touch her," says the director, "on the shoulder." Breaking the perimeter of mutual embarrassment, Bush makes the merest contact and murmurs inaudibly something about her family. As a whistle- blower, the Vice President has been miscast.

That became even clearer when he took the central seat in the Leonardoesque composition of a dozen or so lunchers around a long table. Early on, Bush tried to put himself at ease by telling the students, all brimming with horror stories they are encouraged to tell, "I don't want to talk about what you don't want to." This left the sandwich-room disciples speechless for a moment, each about to be deprived of some carefully prepared item of testimony. But so strong was their sense of mission that soon, despite Bush's signals of anxiety not to hear, they were topping one another with bad things that had happened to them or their siblings as a result of drugs. Bush nodded his head in obvious sympathy and assured them again, "If any of these questions put you on the spot, don't answer it."

In his speech after lunch, Bush told the student body, "I heard this morning about something called 'enabling behavior' -- what other people do to make you think it's O.K. to use drugs." Bush later assured me the words were literally true for him -- he had not encountered the term enabling behavior till that day at Chaffey High, despite service in the President's task force on drugs.

A FALSE PERCEPTION OF WEAKNESS