The Candid Candidate
President Barack Obama is unique in many ways, not the least of which is that he is the first and so far the only president to openly admit to drug use in his youth. Unlike President Bill Clinton who in the 1992 campaign claimed that he had tried marijuana but did not inhale, President Obama admitted that as a youth he had inhaled.
He told an audience of magazine editors. "When I was a kid, I inhaled, that was the point." President Obama wrote in his first book, Dreams From My Father that before entering politics he had used marijuana and cocaine. He said he had not tried heroin because he did not like the dealer who was trying to sell it to him. He told David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, at a meeting of the American Society of Magazine Editors, that he was not making light of the subject. "It was reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy," he said. "Teenage boys are frequently confused."
He also spoke about his past drug use when campaigning in the New Hampshire Primary in 2008. Speaking to high school students in Manchester, he spoke bluntly. "I will confess to you that I was kind of a goof-off in high school as my mom reminded me. You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about. You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs. There was a whole stretch of time that I didn't really apply myself a lot. It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time.' " In high school, his biggest interests were sports and girls, he said. Mostly he smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, Obama wrote, but occasionally he would snort cocaine when he could afford it. Drugs, Obama wrote, were a way he "could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory."
At the time many questioned whether or not Obama's candor would help or hurt his campaign. It turned out that his approach was probably the wisest approach. Rather than waiting for vetters to find out about the candidate's past drug use and exploit it, Obama diffused the issue and made it a non-issue. Obama said "I think that, at this stage, my life is an open book, literally and figuratively. Voters can make a judgment as to whether dumb things that I did when I was a teenager are relevant to the work that I've done since that time."
He told an audience of magazine editors. "When I was a kid, I inhaled, that was the point." President Obama wrote in his first book, Dreams From My Father that before entering politics he had used marijuana and cocaine. He said he had not tried heroin because he did not like the dealer who was trying to sell it to him. He told David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, at a meeting of the American Society of Magazine Editors, that he was not making light of the subject. "It was reflective of the struggles and confusion of a teenage boy," he said. "Teenage boys are frequently confused."
He also spoke about his past drug use when campaigning in the New Hampshire Primary in 2008. Speaking to high school students in Manchester, he spoke bluntly. "I will confess to you that I was kind of a goof-off in high school as my mom reminded me. You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about. You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs. There was a whole stretch of time that I didn't really apply myself a lot. It wasn't until I got out of high school and went to college that I started realizing, 'Man, I wasted a lot of time.' " In high school, his biggest interests were sports and girls, he said. Mostly he smoked marijuana and drank alcohol, Obama wrote, but occasionally he would snort cocaine when he could afford it. Drugs, Obama wrote, were a way he "could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory."
At the time many questioned whether or not Obama's candor would help or hurt his campaign. It turned out that his approach was probably the wisest approach. Rather than waiting for vetters to find out about the candidate's past drug use and exploit it, Obama diffused the issue and made it a non-issue. Obama said "I think that, at this stage, my life is an open book, literally and figuratively. Voters can make a judgment as to whether dumb things that I did when I was a teenager are relevant to the work that I've done since that time."