Barack Obama, Democratic golden boy and presidential candidate hopeful, may have to account for some of the skeletons he let out of his closet with his memoir more than a decade ago.
“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. . . . I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind.”
Obama offered the confession in a memoir written 11 years ago, not long after he graduated from law school and well before he even considered life on the national stage.
Today, Obama, 45, is near the top of polls on potential Democratic presidential contenders, and “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance” has regularly been on the bestseller lists, with 800,000 copies in print in addition to his latest bestseller, “The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream”.
It is yet to be determined his early memoir will be greeted with a new-style acceptance by voters.
In the book, Obama acknowledges that he used cocaine as a high school student but rejected heroin. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though,” he says.
In an interview during his Senate race two years ago, Obama said he admitted using drugs because he thought it was important for “young people who are already in circumstances that are far more difficult than mine to know that you can make mistakes and still recover.
“I think that, at this stage, my life is an open book, literally and figuratively,” he said. “Voters can make a judgment as to whether dumb things that I did when I was a teenager are relevant to the work that I’ve done since that time.”
