If  any of these facts do not bother you, then you obviously fail to recognize their  significance.  Don't you see?  Barack Obama is the first U.S.  president to admit to cocaine abuse, to describe it in a manner designed to  impress the young, and to get away with it.  It's  historic.

Consider  his most famous "admission."  In Dreams from My Father, the first  of his two autobiographies (a historic number of pre-presidential  autobiographies), he describes his college drug use this way:

I  had learned not to care. ... Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when  you could afford it.  Not smack, though[.] ... Junkie.  Pothead.   That's where I'd be headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black  man.  Except the highs hadn't been about that, me trying to prove what a  down brother I was.  Not by then anyway.  I got just the opposite  effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind,  something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my  memory.

Where  to begin?  Why does a grown man (34 years old, and about to embark on a  state senatorial campaign), looking back on his past from a presumably sober,  adult perspective, feel the need to use street lingo like "pot," "blow," and  "smack"?  Perhaps it is true that his drug use -- "by then anyway" -- was  not aimed at proving "what a down brother" he was, but this adult reversion to  the hip language of the street punk certainly is aimed at exactly  that.

George  W. Bush, grilled about his alleged drug use, demurred that he had been wayward  in his youth, but that God had saved him from all that.  In other words, he  at least tried to maintain his adult dignity by drawing an explicit maturity  barrier between the numbskull he had been and the gentleman he had since  become.  Even Bill Clinton, who never did become an adult, nevertheless saw  the need to fake it, and thus produced the Clintonesque charmer about not having  inhaled.

By  contrast, in 2006, when Jay  Leno asked Obama a scripted question about whether he had inhaled,  the U.S. Senator smilingly replied, "That was the point."

A  clever smack (er, I mean "shot") at Clinton, to be sure, and one which Obama  used repeatedly before and during his primary campaign against Clinton's  wife...but isn't there something unsavory about a presidential candidate  elevating himself above a past president by quipping, in effect, "Clinton was a  square; I know how to smoke dope"?

And  consider the historic pomposity of his self-justification in that Dreams passage:

I  got just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was  out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur  the edges of my memory.

What  a load of claptrap.  Obama attempts to romanticize, even to mythologize,  his drug abuse by musing that, although it may initially have been about proving  "what a down brother" he was, it later became part of his struggle for identity  -- about pushing "questions of who he was" out of his mind, about flattening his  bumpy heart, about blurring "the edges of his memory."

Stripped  of the self-glorifying language, what has he really said?  In boring  translation: I started using drugs because I wanted to fit in, but I  continued to use them because I got hooked on the sensation of losing contact  with reality.  How is this different from the experience of any other  "junkie" or "pothead"?

His romanticized language, however, does qualify him as the first  president to publish drug poetry, which is certainly historic.  Unless, of  course, Jack  Cashill is right, and Dreams was actually written by a guy in  Obama's neighborhood  named Bill Ayers, in which case Obama would be  historic as the first president ever to have his autobiography ghostwritten by  someone who, according to an FBI informant, openly  discussed the necessity of killing the ten percent of the U.S. population  who could not be re-educated after the revolution.

While  his "pot" and "booze" intake was apparently substantial -- perhaps historically  so, at least by presidential standards -- Obama/Ayers (identity is such a  free-flowing thing when you're high) is careful to qualify his cocaine use as  "maybe a little blow when you could afford it."  Notice the highly literary  trick of using the impersonal "you" in that sentence, rather than "I."   After all, he is explicitly describing his own substance abuse here, and he uses  the first-person pronoun throughout the passage.  Suddenly, however, in the  "blow" reference, he becomes "you," and qualifies his activity with the  distancing "maybe," thereby rendering his cocaine use generic, abstract, almost  a collective experience rather than a personal one.  It is as though he  wishes to put his use of hard drugs on the table, but simultaneously to "spread  the crime around," if you will, by categorizing it as just one of those things  "you" do as a student.

I  don't know about you, but I was a student within roughly the same timeframe as  Obama, and I never used cocaine, even "when I could afford it."  I never  smoked marijuana, either.  This is not holier-than-thou preaching.  In  high school, I had a few friends who smoked marijuana and hashish "when they  could afford it" -- i.e., very regularly.  I didn't disown them for it, but  I also never chose to join them in it.  One doesn't have to, you  know.

But  I can say this with certainty: if one of my drug-using high school friends were  running for public office today, I wouldn't be able to vote for him.  In  fact, I would be surprised that he would have the gall to do it, given his past  indulgence in illegal and disreputable activities.  I would be unable to  avoid thinking of him as I so often saw him in the past, and as voters should  picture Obama now: glazed over, using Visine eye drops to remove the redness  before class, smiling stupidly at nothing in particular, snickering  uncontrollably with other stoned friends in the classroom, talking like an idiot  about the things stoners talk about -- and cruising through school neighborhoods  in search of a local pusher with whom to engage, conscience-free, in his  habitual criminal  activity.

And  the people I knew were "merely" using so-called soft drugs; they did not share  Obama's cocaine habit.  The lifelong protection from media scrutiny that  Obama has earned with that clever abstract phrase from 1995 -- "maybe a little  blow when you could afford it" -- is historic as the most practically  efficacious admission of felonious behavior in presidential  history.

Notice  that he doesn't say he did only a little cocaine.  He says he did "a  little" cocaine when he had the money  to buy it.  How often was that?  And couldn't the most hardened  addict say the same?  Obama was not a kid who, like so many succumbing to  peer pressure, "tried" drugs.  He was a full-blown (oops, I mean  "habitual") drug-user.

Historians  of the future will be hard-pressed to explain how the most successful nation on  Earth, with the most destructive weapons at its command, and with a political  system that invests everything in the  prudence and self-restraint of its leaders, could have elected as its president  a man who is impervious to shame in talking about his long-term drug use, and  who appears on comedy shows to make jokes about having been a better pot-smoker  than another president.

While  they're at it, those scholars might take a crack at explaining how such a nation  could have elected a president who has  been described by a Ph.D. who knew him in his historic university days as a  committed Marxist-Leninist; a president who explained  his historic choice to work as a community organizer in Chicago as a search for  "what the possibilities were for progressive politics in the black community"; a  president whose academic records have remained historically sealed; a president  who, as a state senator, publicly criticized  the U.S. Constitution as ignoring "issues of redistribution of wealth, and ...  economic justice," bemoaned the Warren Court's lack of radicalism, and  criticized the civil rights movement for neglecting "the activities on the  ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through  which to bring about redistributive change"; and a president who has  historically strolled blithely through all of these revelations without serious  media questioning in the country that entrenched freedom of the press in the  first entry of its Bill of Rights.

However  they explain these things, there is no doubt that those future historians will  regard their collective effect as historic -- whether as the final slap in the  face that revived a great nation, or as a perfect symbol of the irreparable  moral deterioration of a once-noble civilization, it's still too early to  tell.

Notwithstanding  Obama's pro forma protestations about not being "proud" of his drug use, he is  clearly unable to resist using this cool past to attract cool voters, and to  differentiate himself from his square predecessors.  This is not  surprising.  He got caught up in drugs in the first place out of a desire  to be cool, to prove he was "a down brother."

Perhaps  today, without the objective distance of history, only the "uncool" can see what  the pop-cultural euphemism "cool" -- as the term has been used since the 1960s  -- really means.  To be cool, whatever its self-deluded admirers might like  to imagine, means to be a follower, to lack independent thought, to be afraid of  standing apart from even the dumbest trends among one's peers -- to be willing,  if necessary, to annihilate one's own reason and conscience in order to "fit in"  and be liked.  Thus, if your friends are cokeheads, cool means being a  cokehead.  If your friends are leftist radicals, cool means being a leftist  radical.  Obama is nothing if not cool.

When  it comes to choosing the leaders of the free world, however, I'll take the  squares every time.