Folks, these are your Republican candidates on drugs.
Yes, we know that jobs and the economy are the marquee issues for this campaign. Even major topics such as war and education are getting short shrift among the wannabe nominees.
But those reefer-mad kids over at Students for Sensible Drug Policy are trying to, uh, smoke the candidates out on their favorite subject.
In a series of videos posted to YouTube, student volunteers have caught the candidates — sometimes awkwardly — on the campaign trail, explaining their stances. Squirm alert.
Watch Mitt Romney try to dodge a question and claim not to know what industrialized hemp is. Behold Rick Santorum explaining why most of the time he’s for states’ rights and small government, but when it comes to drugs, he’s with the feds.
“Federal government does have a role in making sure states don’t go out and legalize drugs,” Santorum tells a young woman attending a speech who identifies herself as a marijuana user.
Pass the chips, dude. This is some entertaining TV.
In another video, though, Newt Gingrich indicated that he’s not in favor of harsh jail time for drug users. “You shouldn’t be arrested,” Gingrich says when a woman who says she’s a recreational drug user asks whether she should be arrested.
You can practically see the gears in his head spinning as he calculates how much of a jerk he’d seem if he went hard-line on such a nice young lady — on camera. And then he turns paternal. “You also shouldn’t do it,” he admonishes the youthful pot enthusiast.
But let’s put policy positions and questions of penal codes and states’ rights aside and get to the really juicy stuff. Have any of the candidates sampled the goods themselves?
Unclear for the other major candidates, but Santorum and Gingrich have both fessed up to having used. Santorum smoked pot in college, something he says he later came to regret. Gingrich says his toking took place in graduate school.
Both painted their dabbles in illegal drugs as a product of youthful indiscretion — and in Gingrich’s case, nothing more than a sign of the times — much like the thick glasses he sported back in the day. Gingrich told the Associated Press in 1994 that his pot use was “a sign we were alive and in graduate school in that era.”
In the 20 years since Bill Clinton claimed he didn’t inhale, drug use among presidential candidates has become almost a non-issue — but it clearly still gets some people fired up.
Walt was too busy?
President Obama’s new domestic policy chief, Cecilia Munoz, formerly head of White House intergovernmental affairs, is moving from her fine southeast-corner office on the second floor of the West Wing all the way over to the northeast corner.
Unclear who gets her old job for this year, but the early soundings are that it’s likely to be someone already in the administration, since that, all things considered, would make for a smoother transition.
We’re hearing there were some other excellent names the White House looked at for the domestic policy job, including Harvard law professor Cass Sunstein, head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, and Walter Isaacson, chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, head of the Aspen Institute and author of the mega-, mega-bestselling biography of Apple founder Steve Jobs . (Before that, he wrote widely acclaimed bios of Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin .)
Loading...
Comments