Let Obama Smoke

Perhaps the largest stain on Obama's record so far reeks of tobacco: The president-elect is a recidivist smoker, mostly by cadging other people’s cigarettes. Some argue that, as a role model, Obama should quit for good, but today in Slate, Ron Rosenbaum asks, "Do you want Barack Obama, the guy who has his finger on our nuclear trigger, notorious nicotine addict, to be dying for a smoke?" He wonders "whether some of Obama's finer qualities aren't bound up in his alleged nicotine sins. That contemplative self-possession that so many admire him for. It might come from Obama's ability to sit back, inhale a puff or two, slow down and think—meditate, cogitate—before acting." Obama's addiction humanizes him and cuts across his image as a Whole Foods-loving liberal, he argues. It may be best, in the end, to just let the president pick his poison. After all, "Did George W. Bush make great decisions as a president while abstaining from alcohol?"