OVERNIGHT GUESTS

A few days ago, the White House handed out a list of 160 friends, family members and political supporters who had stayed overnight with President and Mrs. Bush in the first 20 months of the Bush administration. And guess what? Nothing happened.

The announcement came late on a Friday, when many White House correspondents had written their Sunday pieces and left for the weekend. But even so, if it had been Bill and Hilary Clinton’s guest list, it would have caused a major hullabaloo. True, one reporter wanted to know how many of the guests had slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, subject of endless editorials, columns and talk shows during the Clinton years. White House spokeswoman Anne Womack said she didn’t know whether any had slept there, adding mildly, “They sleep in a variety of guest rooms in the White House.

The president and Mrs. Bush enjoy spending time with their friends and family and have invited friends and family to stay as guests in the White House.” The press let it go at that.

Many newspapers didn’t even carry a story about the Bush guest list. The Detroit News and The Washington Times were among the few that printed the complete list, distributed by The Associated Press. There was no suggestion that the Bush invitations had anything to do with political contributions, although a half-dozen Bush donors and fund-raisers known as “pioneers” were among the guests on the list. Each “pioneer” had raised at least $100,000 for Mr. Bush’s 2000 campaign, helping take in a record $100 million for the Republican primaries.

Among the guests was Lee Cullum, a columnist for The Dallas Morning News, who agreed on the “Jim Lehrer News Hour” in 1997 that the proper word for Mr. Clinton’s use of the Lincoln Bedroom was “crass.” She said: “Yes it is crass. It’s vulgar. It’s terrible taste.” She said her paper had called for a special prosecutor in this “systematic selling of the White House in bits and pieces.” Yet this time the same newspaper’s Web site shows no mention of the Bush guest list.

Why the difference? Could it be that Mr. Clinton was more obvious in rewarding big givers? Only partly. The fact is that some in the White House press corps disliked Mr. Clinton and grabbed any stick to beat him with. Another factor is that Mr. Bush has declared the nation at war against terrorism, and the media are cautions about seeming to harass a wartime president. Sex could have something to do with it, too, Mr. Clinton being notorious and Mr. Bush being known as a moral family man.

But if any of the Bush guests slept in the Lincoln Bedroom, they and the Clinton guests were not the only ones to do so. The nation’s first Republican president used the room as an office, but he often met there with friends and campaign contributors looking for government patronage jobs as rewards for their political support. Abraham Lincoln outspent his opponent Stephen Douglas 2-to-1 and waged the first $100,000 campaign in U.S. history.