I wouldn't normally post anything by Gail Collins (Bob Somerby accurately describes her as "loathsome"), but since a number of DUers apparently like to read her thoughts when she's writing about the Clintons, I thought they would be interested in reading her thoughts about how Obama should prepare to deal with his past drug use.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/opinion/15collins.html?_r=2&ref=opinion&oref=slogin&oref=slogin<edit>
Campaigns only behave well when they’re far ahead or far behind. When they’re all bunched together, teetering between victory and disaster, they get sweaty and sloppy and borderline insane. (Hillary is probably regretting the day she called this the “fun part.”) Still, unless you’re a candidate, this is not a bad thing. The whole point of the Iowa caucuses — if there is any point to the Iowa caucuses — is to see how everybody functions under stress.
“I’ve been tested. I’ve been vetted. There are no surprises,” Clinton assured Iowans yesterday. Nobody in their right minds would presume that anything involving the Clintons will be surprise-free, but Hillary’s big selling point has indeed always been her ability to forge ahead through unimaginable political disasters. Now, voters are getting to see how her presidential candidacy holds up when she’s losing her lead in the polls.
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.
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.
The classic way to get rid of a past-misbehavior problem is to turn it into an inspiring story about sin and redemption. But Obama has a hard time with the cheesy side of political campaigns, and being required to dredge up emotions he doesn’t necessarily feel.
“The point was to inhale. That was the point,” he said, when someone asked the inevitable question.