Vice President Al Gore and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, the putative front-runners in the 2000 presidential race, are, for men virtually destined to become bitter enemies, remarkably alike: Each is the son of a powerful politician, each is a son of privilege, each has an elite prep school/Ivy League upbringing beneath the Southern good-old-boy veneer.

And each, while running for president, is running from something – his past. If character counts, both have some serious accounting to do. With a nominating process increasingly decided early by money and organization, the time for the public to see the spreadsheet is now.

The obvious, immediate challenge for Mr. Gore is to separate himself from his boss. That process already is under way – he said a lot more in his first official week of campaigning about family values and marital virtue than he did about the IMF or Social Security. The story of how he scolded President Clinton during a Cabinet meeting is being told and retold. If he can shed that albatross, he also can shed his image for trendy goofiness.

What he cannot shed, but must explain, is his record as a political fund-raiser. The vice president may be spotless at home; at the office, things get a little grubby. The Buddhist nuns and the law-fudging phone calls are froth compared to his associations with convicted cocaine smugglers, convicted money launderers, indicted campaign-finance-law violators.

With only four years in office, Gov. Bush doesn’t have much in the way of a public record to explore. So far, he has succeeded in stiff-arming questions about his personal conduct by vaguely alluding to a rambunctious youth (which apparently lasted until age 40). He’ll be one lucky son-of-a-president indeed if he can keep the focus on sex, drugs and perhaps even rock ‘n’ roll, for it’s his business dealings that reek.

Most oilmen don’t become fabulously wealthy by running failed companies. Most investors in a small oil company with no offshore drilling experience that inexplicably got a huge contract for offshore drilling in the Middle East didn’t know to sell out just weeks before Iraq invaded Kuwait. Most casual sports fans don’t get to buy a slice of a major league baseball team for $600,000 and then sell it for $14 million.

It is the involvement of this compassionate conservative with the Texas Rangers that should cause the most alarm among true conservatives. The sweetheart ownership deal is one thing; the taxpayer-funded new Ballpark, with the adjacent land obtained from an unwilling seller through the use of eminent domain condemnation, is quite another.

It’s far too early for anyone to be crowned as a nominee, but it’s not too early for the party activists who control the nominating process to be asking not who can win the presidency but who deserves the presidency. Democrats may want to give former Sen. Bill Bradley (good jump shot, fair public record, highly suspect fund raising) a closer look. Republicans have a slew of contenders to consider; they may find that Sen. John McCain’s military record and strong independent streak outweigh his membership in the Keating Five.

In 1992, voters elected a man they knew was given to fibbing and philandering. The reality turned out far worse than anyone suspected; the sour political and social climate is the result. This batch of contenders seems more susceptible to avarice than libido, but the character questions remain and they require full, unequivocal answers. Americans don’t expect a president to be squeaky clean. But after what they’ve been through, they at least deserve one who comes clean.