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First kids make us face up to a problem
© St. Petersburg Times, Don't bother yapping about the slugs of the media horde invading the private lives of the president's kids. Truth is, the president's kids live in the limelight. Barbara and Jenna Bush ended up names on a police blotter. Spare me the speech about how newsroom lefties probably looked askance at the misbehavior of Chelsea Clinton. If any had been disclosed, it would have been reported, and the House of Representatives probably would have convened a committee to investigate. Late last April, Jenna Bush was caught with a beer at a bar in Austin, Texas. She pleaded no contest but learned no lesson. Two weeks after her plea, she was caught again, this time with her twin sister, Barbara. Jenna was charged with using a fake ID to get a drink, and Barbara was charged with illegal possession of alcohol. Just because most college kids do what Jenna and Barbara Bush did is no reason to dismiss it. It is instead the very reason to talk about it. Unhappily for the Bush kids, they've provided the country their father runs with a teaching moment. The teacher in this case is the Distinguished Research Professor in the department of psychology at the University of South Florida, Mark Goldman. Goldman is the co-chairman of a group of researchers and college presidents who are conducting a study for the National Institute of Alcoholism and Alcohol Abuse on the prevalence of college drinking and the damage it does. The report will be released in early fall. It will examine the damage caused by drinking on campus -- not just deaths from alcohol poisoning and car wrecks, but assaults, property damage and lousy school performance. Goldman wouldn't talk specifics, but the news won't be good. "The numbers we have will surprise and shock people," he said. Because Jenna Bush has been caught twice, I asked the professor specifically about her. "The Jenna Bush event is a perfect lead-in to what we're doing. It's an exemplar," Goldman said. "If you're dealing with the daughter of the president, it certainly shows something every parent should be concerned with." Alcoholism tends to run in families. President Bush has acknowledged his own excessive drinking, and he stopped when he was 40. This fact alone ought to cause worry about the Bush daughters. Nobody knows the specific drinking habits of the two 19-year-olds. There is, though, this detail: In a most remarkable use of public money, Jenna dispatched her Secret Service agents to a Texas jail last February to pick up a boy she knew who'd been arrested for underage drinking. Alcohol hits women harder than men. It takes less for us to get drunk. Our bodies are smaller, so the alcohol we drink ends up more highly concentrated than in men. We get more bang for our happy hour buck. And when we get older, we tend to drink in private, so that our alcoholism is more easily concealed. We end up in a most unexclusive club. There are about 12-million drunks in this country. And many of them got their real education in the disease in college. Florida has a special -- and I stretch the meaning of the word -- place in this story. Our two best known universities, the University of Florida and Florida State, are regularly rated among the top party schools in the country. I can only imagine how they'll fare in Professor Goldman's study. And I can only imagine how the First Parents are feeling. Embarrassed? Probably. Angry? Probably that, too. Worried? I'd bet.
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Times columns today Gary Shelton Mary Jo Melone From the Times Metro desk |
