Pompo

Obama Loses His "Cool"
On the issue of marijuana legalization, Obama supporters are learning that the president differs little with the past few administrations.
5/28/09|Black and White| by Matt Welch - Opinion



When the generation of Americans under the age of 30 gets around to realizing that our nation's handsome young president might not be nearly as cool as they had hoped, it won't be hard to affix a date on when the milk began to sour. It was March 26, 2009, when Barack Obama conducted a live town hall press conference featuring questions submitted online.

Near the beginning of this hip and mildly groundbreaking interaction, the president said: "We took votes about which questions were gonna be asked. . . . 3.5 million people voted. I have to say that there was one question that was voted on that ranked fairly high, uh, and that was whether legalizing marijuana would improve, uh, the economy and job creation. And, uh [chuckles], uh, I don't know what this says about the online audience [laughs], but I just want—I don't want people to think that—this was a fairly popular question; we want to make sure that it was answered. Uh, the answer is, no, I don't think that is a good strategy to grow our economy."

The live audience laughed and applauded. The kids online? Not so much.

"Way to discredit a lot of the 'online audience' who got you elected, Mr. President," wrote one commenter on the social news aggregating website Digg.com, where Obama's dismissal was heavily criticized. "Enjoy your approval rating now, Mr. President, I think you just lost a bunch of help," wrote another. A third Diggster treated legalization with a seriousness (if not grammaticalness) that Obama failed to muster: "To me this is justa common sense issue, legalize Marijuana, decriminalize drug use, thereby crippling drug lords, creating a safe and in the open means to distribute cannabis, give the economy a shot in the arm, and propel snack food sales through the roof. I know the man has a lot on his plate, but seriously this is not justa pot head issue. and it ain't cute that folks are rotting in prisons for cultivating and smoking a ***** plant."

No, it ain't cute at all.

Scratch a young Obama voter and you won't necessarily find someone who likes bailouts or cares about financial market regulations one way or another. Instead, you're likely to hear about how the awful Republicans wage wars, bait gays and racial minorities, and basically act like a bunch of mean old white men. Party membership and voting are frequently more about group identity than philosophical orientation about the proper role of government. There is little doubt about the broad mores of Generation Obama: pro-choice, pro-gay, and pro-legalization. Obama has the first one covered, but his youngest supporters are finding out quickly that on the latter two the president is not offering substantive "change" from the past few administrations.

Freedom works in chaotic, unpredictable ways. Sometimes you can go for decades without an inch of progress; then, the next thing you know, the whole architecture of oppression gets swept away within a matter of days. At a recent screening in Washington, D.C., for the new documentary about the Velvet Revolution, The Power of the Powerless, an American activist type asked the former Czech student leader Simon Pánek how much behind-the-scenes logistical groundwork and drawn-out planning his fellow revolutionaries engaged in before the 10 days in November of 1989 that overthrew the Communist Party. Pánek laughed. "Oh, no," he said. "It all happened so fast, you cannot plan for such a thing."

Marijuana legalization isn't happening remotely that fast, but there are some preliminary indicators that something new and hopeful is stirring within the populace in 2009. It started in late January, when photos surfaced of record-shattering Olympic gold medal swimmer Michael Phelps smoking a bong at a party. As a nation prepared for the usual round of hypocritical and self-righteous denunciations, something stranger happened: nothing. The country's sports pages, normally not known for their permissive attitudes about what humans put in their bodies, greeted the news of a 23-year-old acting like a 23-year-old with a collective shrug.

Ostensibly conservative corporate America, at least in the form of Phelps' many sponsors, almost unanimously stood by their man. The one company that did not, cereal maker Kellogg, found itself the target of a boycott, and its spokespeople spent February loudly (and not very convincingly) claiming that the two sides' parting of the ways was a simple matter of a contract expiring. "Our marijuana laws have been ludicrous for as long as we've been alive," conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in the Washington Post. "The problem isn't Phelps, who is, in fact, an adult. The problem is our laws—and our lies."

Aside from the shattered lives of those caught either in the drug war or in the dangerous black market that prohibition produces, the lies are what make marijuana criminalization so infuriating. For decades we have allowed billions of our tax dollars to be spent on propaganda telling us, falsely, that pot is "dangerous," that winners don't do drugs, and that recreational drug users finance terrorism. Barack Obama is the living refutation of all of that: Not only did he inhale, he freely admitted that "that was the point." Yet countless federal agencies still require either marijuana-free pasts or (more likely) skilled lying about it. This at a time when more than half of Americans born after World War II have tried pot at least once.

Forcing people to lie, even a little bit, is one of the single most corrosive things a government can do. That's the bad news. The good news is that this model is ultimately unsustainable, for the simple reason that people would rather tell the truth. At Andrew Sullivan's blog in March and April, readers sent in dozens of testimonials explaining that they are perfectly upstanding members of society yet have broken the nation's marijuana laws multiple times in the past and are now tentatively "coming out of the closet" about it. Though it's another sign that the architecture of lies is finally showing the first signs of collapse, the act is nonetheless kind of pathetic. What kind of fearful, groveling supplicants have we become after four decades of abuse?

That's why Obama's pot answer, and the immediately hostile reaction to it by his core fan base, was so interesting. The president has done some good things in office, most notably giving word to the Drug Enforcement Administration that it is no longer to conduct raids on medical marijuana clubs in states where they are legal. Though there still have been a couple of raids during the transition period, the new policy presents a marked change from the past. But considering that this is about as far as Obama appears willing to go, events and public sentiment may soon overtake him.

In moments of liberation, leaders who seemed so progressive during times of stagnation suddenly appear archaic, even obstructionist. Mikhail Gorbachev was far more liberal than the communist leaders of East Germany and several other Soviet satellites, yet the revolutionaries there who rammed through the opening he helped create nonetheless tended to hate his guts. He was, after all, still an authoritarian communist. By demonstrating that some winners do use drugs, and by allowing cannabis clubs to show the world that pot buyers and sellers are as American as apple pie, Obama is perhaps unwittingly helping to unleash a long-overdue correction in the way America lies to itself. Taking advantage of that window of opportunity might not be a good strategy for growing the economy, but it's an excellent way to begin regrowing our spines. &

Matt Welch, an assistant editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, is the author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick.

TheQuestionMark

you mean people really believed Obama was the answer to our problems? hahaha

__________________
"I love you Mary Jane"
-Spiderman

Frylok

Great article. Thank you.

Vesey

Good to read.

__________________

Dr Trevis

this is good

mastershake407

I want pot legalized as much anyone else on here, but shame on those of you who voted for him thinking that he would actually do anything, let alone keep his promises. He IS a politician after all. Many people got sucked up in all the "hope and change" bullshit and now that he is elected he doesn't give a shit about you or me. As he has already demostrated in the press confrence by just laughing us off.

One
Big
Ass
Mistake
America

Jared_320

Now that I think about it, It doesn't really bother me that Obama answered "NO" to the question in the town hall meeting, it was that he had to joke about and the "online community," like we live online or something, WTF?

CVV1

McCain wasn't going to legalize it, either. Obama is our best chance.

LowRider

So ingrained with the two parties. did you even vote? If so did you not see the other people on the ballot? ignorance is bliss or is it bliss is ignorance?

BillieBudd

I have a feeling that Obama is not opposed ( and that ain't bad, compared to actively fighting any hint of loosening things they way they are), but only an idiot would have addressed that question early in his term, and whatever he is, an idiot he is not.
I don't know how it will play out, I hope in the positive before I head Up Yonder, but at least he is an open minded man of the 21st century and not what Bush and his minions were...the thing is to get out and work on the state level, talking rationally to those who might have swallowed the Prohibition hook, educate them, pointing out in jargon free words (a la Buzzby) the BS from the other side and get your state either accepting of Medical MJ or talking about DeCrim or Legalization...it's the only way as I see it..Don't expect some stroke of the pen...