When I first saw this, I just laughed. It was a reflex action, because, come on.

Shaheen said Obama’s candor on the subject would “open the door” to further questions. “It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?’” Shaheen said.

Yes, Mr. Black Senator, when was the last time you sold the crack cocaine? Are you now denying that the shorties on the street financed your Senatorial bid? Why can’t you just obfuscate on this issue like every other politician!?!?

Three problems. Let’s take them in turn:

1) I don’t recall anyone digging deep in to Clinton and Bush’s past drug uses with “Did you sell drugs? Did you share them with friends or give them away? Are you still a big ol stoner?” It ended with the pat answers of “I didn’t inhale” and “I quit all that stuff and found GOD.” There is an air of racism here that was not present with the two former drug using presidents.

2) He first publicly admitted his teenage drug use in a book published 12 freakin’ years ago! So how do you go about targeting this drug use he’s been so open about? By claiming that while you would never dare suggest such a thing, we have to be prepared for those dirty Republican tricks.

3) The actual argument in the article and the quote is telling the truth to the American people is bad bad bad. Which is completely anathema to what most Obama supporters are looking for!

The Clinton campaign distanced themselves from the quotes with this milquetoast release:

Senator Clinton is out every day talking about the issues that matter to the American people. These comments were not authorized or condoned by the campaign in any way.

And they made Bill Shaheen say he was sorry. And if you buy that, I have some beautiful beach front property to sell you in Montana.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 12th, 2007 at 10:34 pm and is filed under Personal. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.