Obama's Past: Pot, Coke, and Goofing Off

Usually, it's Michelle Obama's job to discuss her husband Barack Obama's bad habits and flaws.

Today was different. Obama did the dirty work. He talked about points in his life when he was a slacker and drug user.

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) -- Presidential hopeful Barack Obama on Tuesday told high school students that when he was their age he was hardly a model student, experimenting with illegal drugs and drinking alcohol.

Obama stopped by a study hall at Manchester Central High School and answered students' questions about the war in Iraq and his education plan. But when an adult asked about his time as a student, Obama spoke bluntly.

"I will confess to you that I was kind of a goof-off in high school as my mom reminded me," said Obama, an Illinois Democrat who grew up in Hawaii

"You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about. You know, got into drinking. I experimented with drugs," he said. "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 his book, Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, Obama writes about partaking in illict substances.

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.

That's pretty slimy. Obama tried to avoid talking about cocaine here, but Obama's drug use is not a secret.

If that's the dirt that Hillary has on Obama, it won't be a surprise.

Is there more about Obama's drug use that we don't already know?

Is that what Robert Novak was talking about?

I doubt it, but you never know. Dems like to keep their powder dry and fire at the most opportune times.

The AP article continues:

...Obama told students he developed his sense of social justice at college — he attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years before transferring to Columbia University in New York. Before he got to Columbia, he said, he lived a naive life.

"I went to high school in Hawaii, so there was a lot of opportunity to goof off because the weather is really good all the time," he said. "I did well in school, but I didn't really apply myself. I did what I needed to do to get into college and it came fairly easily to me."

His biggest interest was in sports and girls.

"I was big on basketball. We were state champs. I thought I was better than I was," said Obama, who finds time on the campaign trail to still play a pickup game.

He then added: "I thought about girls a lot, I won't lie."

Good weather equals goofing off?

He should tell Milwaukee Public School students that. Crappy Wisconsin weather should mean less goofing off by MPS students. Obama's "good weather" excuse doesn't fly. Goofing off knows no weather restrictions.