Why Obama’s and Bush’s ‘youthful indiscretions’ are dissimilar

No one really believes that the AWOL alcoholic/cocaine addict that fronted a coup by the corporate interests that drive the military-industrial complex is really sober, do they?

Check out this pic from meeting in 2006:

http://mindprod.com/image/people/bushbeer.jpg

That lie about dur chimpfuhrer quitting drinking cuz of his wife, “pickes” (quite the case-study herself) is just another media fabrication.

The question is whether Obama has worked out a way to explain all this to the more conservative voters he’d be wooing next fall. (Particularly if the Republican nominee is Mitt Romney, who has never tried coffee.) That doesn’t rank up there with health care programs when it comes to serious issues, but if you want the candidate with the best chance of winning, it’s a fair concern.

Is it? I have a tendency to be cynical about voter sophistication, but I find it very hard to believe there are a significant number of Americans who consider youthful indiscretions a disqualifying factor in a presidential campaign.

I think this is the interesting part of the exchange.

And I tend to see this much as I see some of Clinton’s faults (but, oddly, I cannot bring myself to lump Biden’s 10-yr old plaigerism into this category). Yes, we want an electable candidate. But there is no sense making that the determining factor because no one really knows what it means. During the primaries, did anyone say “hey, I bet the Republicans can really beat Dukakis by arguing he looks silly in a tank and doesn’t get angry enough at the idea of Kitty being raped, so we’d better pick someone else? Of course not: we said “people vote their pocketbooks – his Massachusetts Miracle will be great to run on!”

The reality is that (a) the Rethugs will slime anyone – again, Dukakis was as skeleton-free as you could want, and he still got hammered and (b) neither we (not even they) know which manufactured issue will stick. So in the end, trying to predict or preempt that reality is silly. We just can’t let fears about them pick our candidate. All we can do is judge who seems best able to roll with whatever comes their way, hit back effectively, and present enough good attributes to earn support to outweigh whatever slime gets thrown about.

Whether it’s the same or different and regardless of whether the criminal or character angle is more important, it’s notable that Democrats not would not have hesitated an instant to play Bush’s DUI to the hilt in 2000 if it had come to light in time. That’s Democrats. I would certainly not expect Republicans to go any lighter if positions were reversed.

Barack Obama probably did a smart thing trying to inoculate himself on this issue by getting it out in the open early himself. It’s likely that most Democrats are willing to cut him a break on this and some even go as far as to hail his admissions as courageousness. But it may still remain to be seen whether a majority of independents are inclined to be as charitable, and whether they would remain so after the Republicans got through with it.

But you do have to kind of figure that regardless of who the Democratic nominee is, they’re going to have to weather a shitstorm to get to the White House. That’s not a question of whether, it’s only a question of which.

Obama quit at 20; Bush at 40. Right there, you can see that Obama is twice as smart as Bush and has always been, even as a kid.

“I have a tendency to be cynical about voter sophistication, but I find it very hard to believe there are a significant number of Americans who consider youthful indiscretions a disqualifying factor in a presidential campaign.” — CB

What they *think* and what they *say* may not always be the same thing, esp. when it comes to Rethugs.There’s no doubt that they’ll throw the drug use at Obama with as much innuendo added to the facts as they can slither in, even if it is old news, even if it is long past, even if he had always been open about it, etc, etc, all unlike the Shrub. Which is why I’m a bit worried about your report that:
“This week, David Axelrod took the extra step of telling reporters that Obama never sold or shared drugs with anyone.”

Now that was stupid; why deny something that hadn’t yet been (openly; Clinton’s parsed innuendo is something else) said? It could be just me — having grown up in a country where the govt. had total control over the media, I believed *only* the things they denied — but it seems to be “asking for it”, because people are likely to think “No smoke without fire”.

I think Gail Collins’ second paragraph in her excerpt is more than adequately answered by her first one:

For Obama, the real question is not about what he ingested in his freshman year of college. If middle-aged men were disqualified from serious jobs because of recreational drug use as teenagers, there would be nobody left to run the stock exchange.

There’s nothing to argue about Obama’s past, because Obama’s past amounts to, “So what?”.

I know there are probably still a lot of people out there who believe that if they drive a little drunk, it’s not that dangerous. But there are also a lot of people who see that issue as a very big deal- primarily people who knew someone or had a loved one who was killed by a drunk driver. So a DUI is a big deal.

Bush’s “indiscretions” lasted further in his life than Obama’s, into middle-age. The older you get, the more stupid you have to be to keep doing it.

What Obama did is a lot different. There are a lot of teenagers who smoke 4 joints a year or something before they turn 20, or when they’re 21 or 22. It hardly makes them a gangster. They’re more like bad-boy wannabes who are just trying to fit in and look cool and would never do anything more criminal, harmful, or alarming than smoke a little of a joint with a few of their friends every once in a while, because they’re basically nice kids going through a phase, and are too scared to risk getting into trouble by shoplifting, or being a hooligan, or graffiti, or any of that.

And just a word on black v. white:

If I know a black teenager who smokes pot, and know little else about him, it doesn’t make me think “He must be a drug dealer or be a crook” because their aren’t a lot of black guys in my area who are that big into stuff like that. If I knew a white person in my area who smoked pot, I would honestly think it more likely that they’re a drug deaker than the black person, because the white people in the suburbs where I’m from have more spare money and thus are a lot more likely to be able to start up being a pot dealer.

in political terms it’s hipocrisy but in clinical terms america’s bi-polar love affair with desparate housewives on one hand and righteous indignation with same sex unions on the other points to a vast collective gurdjieffian buffer that allows us to never see the two at the same time.

obama’s frankness does not compute — how can he not, as the taoist saying goes, reflect the ubiquitous political “the bigger the front, the bigger the rear”?

And then there are tons of over-six-foot-tall, macho, white guys, walking around the malls on the weekend, repulsed at the sight of the black teenagers they see. These white males hold themselves out as so tough, but they see those guys and think it’s amazing that such dangerous people are allowed around.

Guess what? That sad-looking, bored-looking black guy isn’t a crook. He’s a nobody. If he had a job at Dairy Queen or some place and a positive male role model he could really look up to, he’d probably be turning his life around great.

The fact is, for a lot of teenagers, their rebellion is totally, completely confined to not doing their homework, doing a very small amount of drugs, and not taking out the trash when they’re told to. But all these angry white males who are pushing this racist agenda are so scared they see a threat every where they turn.

Gail Collin’s writing is getting better and better each week. She’s less snarky and pleased with herself than Maureen Dowd. BUT:

“Collins suggests these same conservative voters would worry about Obama’s drug use as a teenager. If they’re open-minded enough to consider voting for a black Democrat from Chicago, I seriously doubt this would make any difference at all.”

I don’t think that the conservative voters are going to consider voting for ANY Democrat.

As usual, the Democrats are trying to attract ALL voters; when are they going to realise that the 30% Republican base would never vote for a Democrat (even if it was Jesus himself). Just as roughly 30% of Dems would never vote Republican. The Republicans don’t bother trying to get the Democratic base. The “Reagan Democrats” of the early ’80’s were loosely tied to the Dems but were always suseptable to Republican “poaching”.