It’s been a pleasant surprise that the presidential campaign has been largely indifferent to Barack Obama’s admitted drug use as a teenager. Voters don’t seem to care, reporters can’t find a reason to note its relevance, and even Republicans have generally decided there’s no point in pursuing the issue. Obama has been candid about it, he’s acknowledged his mistakes, and aside from some inappropriate comments from a couple of Clinton campaign surrogates, there just doesn’t seem to be any controversy here.
But the NYT puts an unexpected twist on the story today — apparently, Obama may have done less experimenting with drugs than we’ve been led to believe.
Nearly three decades ago, Barack Obama stood out on the small campus of Occidental College in Los Angeles for his eloquence, intellect and activism against apartheid in South Africa. But Mr. Obama, then known as Barry, also joined in the party scene.
Years later in his 1995 memoir, he mentioned smoking “reefer” in “the dorm room of some brother” and talked about “getting high.” Before Occidental, he indulged in marijuana, alcohol and sometimes cocaine as a high school student in Hawaii, according to the book. He made “some bad decisions” as a teenager involving drugs and drinking, Senator Obama, now a presidential candidate, told high school students in New Hampshire last November.
Mr. Obama’s admissions are rare for a politician (his book, “Dreams From My Father,” was written before he ran for office.) They briefly became a campaign issue in December when an adviser to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Mr. Obama’s chief Democratic rival, suggested that his history with drugs would make him vulnerable to Republican attacks if he became his party’s nominee. […]
Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use.
Let me get this straight. The NYT decided to take a closer look at Obama’s teenaged drug use, and found that those close to him don’t remember him experimenting that much at all.
In other words, the story suggests, Barack Obama may be the first major politician in history to exaggerate his drug use in the wrong direction.
In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.
Vinai Thummalapally, a former California State University student who became friendly with Mr. Obama in college, remembered him as a model of moderation — jogging in the morning, playing pickup basketball at the gym, hitting the books and socializing.
“If someone passed him a joint, he would take a drag. We’d smoke or have one extra beer, but he would not even do as much as other people on campus,” recounted Mr. Thummalapally, an Obama fund-raiser. “He was not even close to being a party animal.”
Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed for this article. A campaign spokesman, Tommy Vietor, said in an e-mail message that the memoir “is a candid and personal account of what Senator Obama was experiencing and thinking at the time.”
“It’s not surprising that his friends from high school and college wouldn’t recall personal experiences and struggles that happened more than twenty years ago in the same way, and to the same extent, that he does,” he wrote.
How very odd. The suggestion seems to be that a politically ambitious young man wrote a book conceding drug experimentation that was less serious than he disclosed.
My inclination is to give Obama the benefit of the doubt — I suspect he’d more far more familiar with this behavior than his college buddies — but it also seems likely that he kept his personal vices private.
It’s a silly political process, and I’m often surprised by what becomes controversial, but I imagine if Republicans went after Obama on this, his response is pretty simple: “Are you suggested that I didn’t experiment with drugs as a teenager enough?”