Are the Bushs the New Kennedys?

As preparations for a state of the union address go, news of a niece arrested on drugs charges is not an ideal start. Usually the White House press team likes to lead up to the most important set-piece speech of the year, releasing hints of the main themes or revealing the president's warm-up technique. What they do not want to do is field calls about a 24-year-old relative of the boss arrested at a pharmacy trying to pick up the anti-anxiety drug Xanax with a fake prescription.

Yet that was how the Bush administration began their Tuesday. Noelle Bush was in police custody, obliging her father Jeb, governor of Florida, to tell how he and his wife were "deeply saddened" by their daughter's behaviour. "Unfortunately, substance abuse is an issue confronting many families across our nation," he sighed.

You can easily imagine the White House reaction: young Noelle was threatening to rain on George W's parade. "How the hell are we gonna spin our way out of this?" one aide doubtless barked at another. Eventually, perhaps, one bright spark saw an upside. "I suppose it does make us look kinda Kennedyesque."

Even if events didn't quite unfold like that, the thought is becoming irresistible. They have neither the looks nor the politics, but the Bushes are showing some alarming similarities to the Kennedy clan - a resemblance that can only be a thoroughly mixed blessing.

Start with young Noelle. Drug trouble is a classic Kennedy trait, whether Teddy Kennedy's legendary bouts with alcohol (now behind him) or the desperate fate of David, son of Bobby Kennedy. Traumatised by seeing his father's assassination live on television, aged just 13 and alone in a hotel room, he spent his youth hooked on heroin. Aged 28, he overdosed, dying in yet another empty hotel room.

The Bushes have had their own battles with substance abuse. (The arrest record is impressive: George W and Jenna, three times; Barbara, twice, Columba, Jeb, George P and Noelle, all once.) But until Noelle, it was drink rather than drugs. Last summer Dubya's twin daughters, Barbara and Jenna, were fined for underage drinking in Texas - prompting much muttering about apples never falling far from the tree. George W was a notorious drunk and Laura Bush has spoken of a virtual ultimatum to her husband, delivered around the time of his 40th birthday: he would have to choose between the bottle and his family.

But even if drink has repeatedly spelled scandal for the Kennedys, too, it is hardly the most striking of the similarities between these two dynasties. Both families come from the same place. Dubya may come on all Texan, but his father was a Connecticut yankee: the private-schooled George Herbert Walker Bush, known universally as Poppy. The family were always top-drawer: George Sr's father was Prescott Bush, the Connecticut senator who in 1954 made his reputation by standing up to his fellow Republican, the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy.

The Kennedys are also elite New Englanders, aiming to lead America from their base in Boston, Massachusetts. And their political family tree has equally deep roots, with John F Kennedy's father Joe serving as US ambassador to London during the second world war. For both Kennedys and Bushes, public service - or political ambition - is the family business.

In each case, the father coveted the White House: George made it, Joe channelled his ambition through his children. In each case, one son was singled out for greatness - only for fate to rule otherwise. Joe Kennedy groomed his eldest son, Joe Jr, for the presidency, but as a fighter pilot in 1944 he was killed in action. The torch passed to the second son, Jack.

George Sr had a strategy, too. While Dubya was seen as too lightweight, Jeb seemed to have the right stuff for the White House: taller, better-looking, more articulate. But this time the voters, rather than fate, took a hand. In 1994, both sons sought election as governors. Dubya sailed through Texas but, in a squeaker, Jeb lost Florida. Like Jack Kennedy before him, George W Bush jumped a place in the family queue.

Behind both dynasties are the same strengths. They have big money: the Kennedy fortune amassed partly through bootleg alcohol during Prohibition, the Bushes' through oil. And both have enjoyed the anchor of a matriarch. The Kennedy clan revolved around Joe's widow Rose, who might have seemed like a frail old dear, but was a toughie. The same is true of Barbara Bush, the silver-haired lady and self-styled grandmother to the nation. Her husband repeatedly claims she is the most loved woman in America but, like Rose before her, there are nerves of steel under that exterior. One US newspaper profile ended with the killer line: "Grandma, my, what big teeth you have."

For political students, though, the almost uncanny parallel is in the manner of their elevation. John F Kennedy arrived in the White House after a photofinish of an election in 1960, when he all but tied with Richard Nixon. Pivotal was the state of Illinois, where Joe Kennedy was accused of using shady, even Mafia, connections to swing the city of Chicago his son's way.

Forty years later, the Bush family was charged with pulling the same stunt, the action now relocated to Florida. Once again it was a family affair, as appointees of brother Jeb worked every legal loophole to deliver the state to their man. While Joe Kennedy had leaned on the likes of Chicago mayor Richard Daley, the Bushes turned to their own team of loyal retainers, chief among them, George Sr's consigliere and former secretary of state James Baker. Both 1960 and 2000 taught America that when a dynastic force pursues the power it regards as its birthright, not much can stand in its way.

Still, the Bushes have a distance to travel before they may replace the Kennedys as America's uncrowned royal family. First, they lack that essential Kennedy trait: glamour. When Barbara Bush was in the White House, wags used to wonder why the president had married his mother. Today's first lady, Laura Bush, is hardly in the Jackie Kennedy league (though that's setting the bar pretty high). As for the men, Dubya is presentable rather than sexy, while Poppy had a sex-appeal rating somewhere around the Michael Ancram mark.

Nevertheless, the glamour gap could soon close. Lauren Bush, daughter of Dubya's brother Neil, has launched a career as a teenage model - she's been a Tatler cover girl - while Jeb's son George P has been hailed as politics' answer to Ricky Martin. He's inherited the dark good looks of his Mexican-American mother, Columba, making "P" a star to watch. Now in his mid-20s, he also knows how to work a crowd.

Mind you, he'll get no help from his genes in the speech-making department. A shining difference between the Bush and Kennedy tribes is eloquence. Phrases turned by Jack Kennedy live on in the American lexicon: "new frontier", "ask not what your country...", "bear any burden". Poppy's best-remembered line is only famous because it was a promise he broke. "Read my lips: no new taxes." As for his son, he has some outstanding speech writers - but his rhetorical trademark remains the syntactic mangle.

More simply, they come from opposite sides of so many divides. Despite their New England roots, the Bushes have aligned themselves with the ultra-conservative south; the Kennedys are synonymous with the liberal north-east. George Sr was an Episcopalian, his son a born-again evangelical; the Kennedys are the first family of US Catholicism. The Bushes are textbook Wasps, while the Kennedys are Irish-America's favourite sons. The Bushes choose Yale, the Kennedys dominate Harvard.

There's one last difference which the Bushes will be only too happy to maintain. For the other meaning of Kennedyesque, besides Camelot lustre, is an almost curse-like pattern of tragedy. The Hyannisport compound has witnessed disaster upon disaster: two assassinations, several plane crashes, drug overdoses, overturned cars and even one death through a skiing accident. Many Americans believe the Kennedys are jinxed as well as blessed, and the Bushes have so far avoided that kind of mystique. They don't seem to have the taste for daredevil risk-taking that made John Jr, for example, fly to his death in 1999.

So a gap will remain between the Montagues and Capulets of US politics. They will always be rivals, but a mutual admiration is just as possible. There was a glimpse of it on Tuesday night as George W gave his state of the union address. He hailed Ted Kennedy as "my friend" - a sign that in politics, as in life, like attracts like.