I’m not sure what to make of the NYT feature “Friends Say Drugs Played Only Bit Part for Obama.”
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.
Vinai Thummalapally, a former California State University student who became friendly with Mr. Obama in college, remembered him as a model of moderation — jogging in the morning, playing pickup basketball at the gym, hitting the books and socializing.
“If someone passed him a joint, he would take a drag. We’d smoke or have one extra beer, but he would not even do as much as other people on campus,” recounted Mr. Thummalapally, an Obama fund-raiser. “He was not even close to being a party animal.”
Are there really a significant number of people out there — let alone among the subset of the population that reads the New York Times — who were worried that Barack Obama was a dope fiend?
To the extent Obama has admitted to holding any policy views, I’ve been against them. And I don’t think he’s got the experience I’d like to see in a president. But he’s obviously a bright, organized, motivated fellow with a sterling record of academic achievement. It never really occurred to me that he’d gotten the top of his class at Harvard Law while stoned.
