Obama's Shtick

Barack Obama needs some new material and as soon as possible.

He's been on his combination book/testing the presidential waters tour for weeks and weeks now.

When someone gets SO much exposure, like Obama has, the lack of spontaneity becomes apparent.

What's supposed to come off as sincere or clever or funny comes off as contrived after you've heard it so many times before.

The latest rerun of his stale material was on Friday's Tonight Show.

BURBANK, Calif. -- Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger first announced his candidacy on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno." Might Barack Obama, who is considering a run for president, do the same?

"This is a great place. Everybody who has announced here has been successful," Leno hinted to Obama, who appeared on Friday's show.

"This is true, but I have to say that I've already committed to the Food Network to announce," Obama quipped before offering his standard answer to a question that follows him everywhere he goes.

Cute.

The speculation about a presidential run does follow Obama. It seems that second only to interest in Obama's plans for 2008 is the public's interest in his past drug use.

Jay Leno predictably brought up the issue.

Obama predictably responded.

Leno asked, "Did you inhale?"

To the audience's delight, Obama replied, "That's the point."

He then went on to say that he didn't mean to make light of it, even though he just had.

Obama said that he wasn't perfect and that there was nothing wrong with being honest about one's past.

That's certainly a different approach than the one taken by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

It's admirable for a politician to be forthcoming. Still, Obama has been using the same lines for too long and interviewers are asking the same softball questions.

He appears to be a performer robotically relying on the shtick that has worked for him in the past.

The Obama luster dulls significantly when he delivers the same old, same old.

There's not a lot of depth there.

I want to hear more. Is Obama presidential material? Is he experienced enough?

Speaking of experience, let's cover Obama's drug use more completely than Leno did. Let's get into more detail.

Obama's drug use goes beyond "inhaling."

In his book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama writes about partaking in more than pot.

This is interesting.

Bernard Schoenburg writes:

Obama, 42, told me recently he had tried marijuana in high school and hasn't consumed any illegal drugs in 20 years. When I asked if there was anything beyond marijuana in his past, Obama said, "That'll suffice."

But the book includes a passage in which Obama discusses how he dealt with questions from his mother when he was 17 and a senior in high school. The context of the book also makes clear that he was trying to deal with the problems his race presented.

"I had learned not to care," he wrote. "I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though. ..."

"Blow" is a street name for cocaine. "Smack" is slang for heroin.

"Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man," Obama wrote. "Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that 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. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. ... You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection."

Obama last week apologized for not telling me earlier about his past as portrayed in the book. He said I had caught him off guard with the drug question and that, at the time, he had not wanted to overshadow his story of that day - his endorsement by the Illinois Federation of Teachers.

Obama was supposedly "caught off guard."

I don't think so.

Does one have to be "caught on guard" to be honest?