the smoking gun.

Ok - so here's my attempt at being relevant and timely: Obama is a smoker?! What the...?!

This little gem has been revealed in the past but maybe it's a slow news day because it's EVERYWHERE right now and this might actually increase his popularity. Well, maybe with the ironic, Beatnik'ish, liberal-type crowd. Wait, they already like him. Maybe he will attract the "we still smoke in dark films where we are honing our craft" Hollywood types. Well, pretty sure he's got that crowd locked-and-loaded as well. Teenagers that are trying to buck the system? Didn't vote in the last election. There's still the post-swing shift workers taking the edge off with a cigarette and an icy beer, or the nurses, the musicians, the college kids trying to look cool, the yuppies and gen x'ers who picked it back up after the dot com bubble burst, the ex-pats and their hangers on, David Duchovny on break from a sex addiction session...oh the list is long. Smoking is alive and well in the good ol' US of A. Is it possible that this closet-smoking side of our Commander in Chief makes him more accessible? More "man-next-door"? Joe Cool 2.0?

How many of us watched the now-infamous tobacco execs testify in front of Congress? If not on C-Span, or 60 Minutes, maybe in the Oscar-nominated film starring Russell Crowe "The Insider"? Isn't the ENTIRE state of California smoke-free in public places? Washington State is looking at banning smoking even in public parks. Hasn't the Truth Project (http://www.thetruth.com) stopped many of us in our tracks with their prolific messaging? According to the Centers for Disease Control, smoking has gone down from about 42% of the general adult population in 1965 to just under 20% in 2007 and yet, that still means that something like 44 million adult Americans smoke. Add in high school students (also 20% of them are smokers according to the CDC) and it's probably pretty close to the total number of people who voted for John McCain in the last election (58 million and some change). This is not an insignificant number. Clearly some messages (and the hit on the pocketbook with increased tobacco taxes) are working, thus the declining numbers, but what does it mean when a wildly popular President reveals that yes, he shares this vice?

I don't know, but I find this whole thing fascinating. I think this past summer he may have signed an anti-smoking bill giving unprecedented control over tobacco to the FDA, and yet maybe he's not unlike many, many Americans craving a drag when stressing about, oh I don't know...the unemployment rate, the state of the economy, Ahmadinejad, the decline of American car companies, North Korea? Can't you picture Obama, huddled outside the kitchen door to the White House, taking long drags, blowing smoke up into the night sky, muttering about the state of the Union? I can. It's maybe not the most confident of visuals, but it's a real one. The media is once again going nuts over throwing this in Obama's face, but I say, light 'em if you got 'em I guess.