¡Obamanos!: The Birth of a New Political Era by Hendrik Hertzberg

Author:Hendrik Hertzberg [Hertzberg, Hendrik]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2009-10-13T16:00:00+00:00

Maybe, though, the mistake wasn’t just the readers’, especially the bleary-eyed among them who hadn’t yet had their morning coffee. After all, it wasn’t exactly news that “drugs” had played a part (and only a “bit part” at that) in the adolescence of the junior senator from Illinois. That particular factoid had been on the public record for more than twelve years. And if it wasn’t news, what was it doing on the front page of the New York Times?

The big news, or bit news, about Obama and drugs had been broken by the future presidential candidate himself, in Dreams from My Father, published in 1995, when he was thirty-three years old. In Dreams, Obama treats his teenage chemical indulgences the way he treats pretty much everything else in his coming-of-age story: subtly, with impressive emotional acuity, against a richly drawn personal, cultural, and social background. Ripped from their context like the heart of an Aztec sacrifice, the facts Obama presents are these: He smoked pot during his last couple of years of high school, in Hawaii, and his first couple of years of college, at Occidental, in California. Once in a while, he treated himself to “a little blow.” After his sophomore year, he transferred east, to Columbia, where he took up running (three miles a day), stopped hanging out in bars, and started keeping a journal. Also, he writes, “I quit getting high.” That’s about all. Substance, apparently, became more interesting to him than substance abuse.

But it’s not as if the Times’ nearly two thousand words had nothing to add to this. “Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others,” the paper’s story teases, as if promising scandal. Is a Perry Mason moment at hand? Not really: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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.