The devil inside Jenna and George

Jenna's actions, by comparison, seem a lot more congenial. Her celebratory ways belong to a venerable tradition, that of the raucous student, the wing-testing youth. Which is why so many of us were taken aback by the moralistic hand-wringing and gloating -- much of it from commentators on the left, who are traditionally libertarian about substance use -- about a 19-year-old who got popped for drinking. Didn't any of these guys ever stand outside the 7-Eleven, like I did in high school a few times, trying to convince some 21-year-old to score them some beer? Give the girl a break -- she's just trying to exercise her God-given right to get twisted!

My colleague Joan Walsh declines to take such a light, Happi-Hour view of young Bush's recent troubles with the law and alcohol. In her view, Jenna and her twin sister Barbara (who was also cited for illegal drinking in the recent unpleasantness at Chuy's) are "acting out" against a pathological conspiracy of silence imposed by their father, a presumed alcoholic who, by his own admission, never told his daughters about his problem. In Walsh's view, the actions of the twins "seem designed to force a family reckoning that their father's drinking never triggered." The family drama being played out in Austin is "Long Day's Journey Into Bush."

Walsh's conjecture may well be true, but in my opinion it pushes the known facts just a little further than one can safely go with them. But buy it or not, her argument is fascinating because it raises yet another culturally contradictory aspect of the Bush presidency, one that also carries a host of subterranean assumptions about the way those on the left and those on the right handle their personal demons: Bush's problem drinking and the way he has dealt with it. Bush has never admitted to being an alcoholic, but because he did admit to having drinking problems that he addressed, he is about as close to being a 12-step president as we've ever had. (Ulysses S. Grant, mercifully, lived before the days of the Pledge.)

The fact that it's a right-wing Republican who is our first self-help president is deeply ironic. For people who overcome their personal problems, in our post-Freud, Oprah-ministered society, are supposed to go through some kind of metamorphosis, a sea change accompanied by deep and honest communication with everyone in sight. Yak yak get in touch with my feelings yak yak I feel your pain yak yak. But those moist, empathetic, talk-it-all-out qualities are totally associated with wimpy, bleeding-heart liberals; they're anathema to macho conservatives, who flaunt their repression like an oversized Texas belt buckle. John Wayne didn't need no stinking John Bradshaw lectures.

Bush's status as a strong, silent reformed drinker leaves him in a murky area, somewhere between the therapized left and the repressed right. And if only his personal behavior was in question, one might simply be content to leave it there. But his and his party's hypocritical drug and drinking policies make it only too clear that here, to use the '60s catchphrase, the personal truly is the political: It's hard not to conclude that Bush's draconian stance on mind-altering substances is the result of his unwillingness or refusal to explore his own youthful behavior, his dismissal of his deeds as simply "bad." They may indeed have been "bad" for him, but the first thing an examined life teaches one is that what is bad for thee is not necessarily bad for me. Moralizing stands in for insight: Every kid languishing in a Texas jail because he was caught with a joint can only regret that Bush didn't go to a few more therapy sessions.

As for whether he needs to go more Oprah with his kids, as Walsh suggests, I don't presume to judge. Jenna may be acting out, but it seems more likely to me that her recent problems are the result of a good old-fashioned desire to get wasted, perhaps combined with something she inherited from dear old Dad: a massive sense of entitlement, a knowledge that no matter what she does, no matter how idiotically she behaves, nothing will happen to her. How could Bush try to tell his daughter with a straight face that her actions have consequences? Forget the laundry list of Bush boo-boos that have been cleaned up for him, from the DUI bust that remained hidden for years to lingering questions about his National Guard record. We're talking about a young woman whose father drank away his youth, then benefited from a series of family handouts and string-pulling, and finally took possession of the White House after losing the popular (and perhaps the electoral) vote. Consequences? Consequences are for losers!

So party on, Jenna. The worst thing that could happen to you is you'll become president.

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