Obama the Fabulist?
I can see it right now: Hillary Clinton’s next line of attack against Barack Obama will be that he is a fabulist. According to the NYT,
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. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.
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.
i.e., Obama was in fact a nerd. Clinton will reply to this shocking revelation in one of two ways:
(1) She will insist that Obama was not “thug” enough to slang rock, that she was deep in the streets of Little Rock when Obama was fraternizing with middle-class whites at Occidental — so deep that husband Bill never knew that she was the notorious ganglord “Hill-Hill” — and that she is so “gutter” that even now, as a respected senator and presidential candidate, she is high on angel dust for most of her waking hours, thus giving her the psychotic strength to fight for America’s working families.
or
(2) She will argue that Obama’s reluctance to drink beer in high school, as described by his classmate and friend Keith Kakugawa, is clear evidence that Obama is a secret Muslim.
I’m kind of hoping she will go with (1), but that remains to be seen.
come on, now!! both of these sound like incredibly wack ideas!!
— nat clint · Feb 10, 06:01 AM · #
I would have preferred #1 also. However, HRC sort of blew her chance with that option when she unleased her faux outrage over her daughter being “pimped out.”
— Jeremiah · Feb 10, 04:41 PM · #
I think she’ll likely just ignore it. Obama as Urkel could make him more appealing to older white voters, which she doesn’t want, and it probably will make little difference to black voters.
— Thomas R · Feb 12, 05:32 AM · #
This info is irrelevant. Which actually makes it a fairly likely source of controversy in this campaign going forward.
— T.K. · Feb 12, 07:07 AM · #
I was a “good kid” that smoked pot and dabbled in coke. Shockingly, drugs don’t instantly turn one into a visible junkie. Actually, I was able to get away with more, “dirt,” because I looked and acted like a “fine, upstanding young man,” 90% of the time. If you went back and quizzed my parents, teachers and friend’s parents they would have no idea how much I actually partied. Smart kids, like Obama obviously was, just know how to keep things on the DL.
— Matt · Feb 12, 04:30 PM · #
Anybody who thinks there is anything intrinsically weird about “nerds” doing drugs should visit the shadier dorms at Caltech or MIT some time. Just sayin’.
— Me · Feb 15, 06:11 AM · #