The answer, I suppose, will be that poor old Ibrahim didn’t have airtight scientific evidence. But like the Turkish historian, I take a much looser, I-know-it-when-I-see-it view of addiction, one that includes a lot of habits for which there are no laboratory findings at all, only the evidence of our eyes and ears. I think our approach to the federal dispensary, for example, is a case study in addiction and substance abuse (two of the principal substances go by the names of ““entitlement’’ and ““pork’’). And I don’t think Bob Dole or Bill Clinton has been any better on this issue than Dole has been in his embarrassing meander through the tobacco patch. So let’s talk about big-picture addiction.

The most recent figure to gain national prominence for taking on the overall subject is former governor Richard Lamm of Colorado, now running for president. As is characteristic behavior in these matters, practically everybody seems to say yes to his stated views on the need for sacrifice and program cuts, and many even to certain kinds of tax increases so long as all this remains abstract and without specific application. But where the particulars are concerned, especially those that affect them personally, they go on ignoring the prescription, madly inhaling and, when challenged, indignantly defending their habit. Meanwhile, many of them continue blithely to say what a splendid public service Lamm is performing by raising these issues in debate and how courageous it is.

Take the first Clinton administration budget in 1993. The blood really flowed over that one. It was defective in many respects and did not cut nearly enough in the way of expenditures, although it did lay a hand on sacrosanct Social Security and faced up to the need to increase some taxes if the deficit were to be significantly reduced. You remember the deficit. It’s that oversized, dangerous, future-wrecking thing that both sides agreed must be brought down and the budget balanced. But the Republicans on this one were in total opposition, the Democrats had to be bludgeoned into going along and even the president, who was behind the whole thing, started expressing second thoughts about key aspects of the package in his new election-year political mode. The caption is that every now and again one party or person or the other does take a step in the right direction, but half the time they pretend not to be doing so, rarely get any but reluctant, twisted-arm support from their own side and are politically clobbered by the opposition.

This does not bring out the saintly in them. The White House returned the budget-package favor by savaging Republicans last year when those Republicans had had the courage to espouse publicly cutbacks in the rate of growth of spending on medical entitlement programs. These were programs those Democrats well knew required prudent cutting. And although some of the GOP proposals went too far, others were similar to what the White House itself had been recommending a year before. The Democrats, of course, did not fall all over themselves to acknowledge this. Nor did they say, ““Well, you’re on the right track in addressing the need to contain the growth of these programs, but you’re too severe; here are some better and less severe alternatives.’’ Instead, they threw for the head, accusing the GOP of monstrous inhumanity in even considering touching Medicare and ran a series of misleading, demagogic TV commercials to make the point.

The basic premise of both parties seems to be that there is no more urgent obligation than cutting the deficit, except for the obligation to humiliate the other side whenever it attempts to. And although individual voters are quick to express their disgust with this, they too, from the farm to the big city to the big lobby and back again, are always able to explain why the grant to them is not pork, pork being the grant to the other guy. I would add that some of us in the press do the same thing: grumping like crazy when any program is cut, which we see as a sign of political hardheartedness, and then lavishly welcoming the quadrennial maverick candidate who takes on the issue of how such things need to be cut. About time! we cry sanctimoniously.

And thus comes the latest Lamm to the slaughter. There seems to me to be in him, as there does in these fellows who talk about being the only ones who will take on the truly tough questions and whose domestic program amounts to a national hairshirt, just the tiniest whiff of moral vanity. Still, they invariably are the only ones who are saying some important, right things to which we all automatically go: clap, clap, clap. ““It is so good for the national discussion,’’ we say. ““Thank God someone has finally raised the real issues.’’ These candidates often are people without many of either the political or managerial skills required for the presidency, but it doesn’t matter as we do not plan to elect them anyway – only to keep thanking our Maker that they are saying these things that we will ultimately ignore.

I suggest it is our final addiction, whether it comes as a John Anderson fix, a Paul Tsongas snort or a handful of Dick Lamm pills. We are addicted to a political-garden-party skunk who must appear on schedule to fill this role and make us feel virtuous about the ““debate,’’ before we move on to support whichever of the two political habit-enablers we favor. In this sense we are a nation of junkies with no rehabilitation program in sight. What this country needs is a cranky 17th-century Turk with clear vision, a mean mouth and a really awesome scimitar.