I left my "reporter hat" at home.

So, I'm generally supportive of Ben Smith's political blogging. I can get around his low-level pro-HRC bias. He's a NYC political blogger, after all. But come on, Ben, this is a little ridiculous.

The short version of the story is that some NYTimes reporter interviewed a bunch of people from Barack Obama's old time days at Occidental and so forth, and it turns out they don't recall him as a raging coke fiend. In fact, they remember him as a thoughtful, funny person with a nuanced grasp of the issues of the day, which, honestly, seems a lot like the Barack Obama I've seen on the trail. Ben then takes a rather large leap of logic and claims that this article is support for his theory that Barack Obama has inflated accounts of his drug use to seem cool, or something?

I find it hard to overlook the rather overheated title of his post: Expose of the Day. Let's be clear, Obama wrote about his drug use in passing. It constituted a page or two of his memoir. The core importance of his drug use is how that experience affected his life, not the raw tonnage of substance he put into his system. Even if you accept Ben's idea that his drug use is overblown, wagging a finger at him for not doing enough drugs to credibly draw life lessons from the experience seems condescending and manifestly counterproductive.

Most of the amplification this story has received is due to some less than subtle statements from HRC affiliates and the subsequent press frenzy those remarks triggered. To my mind, this looks a lot more like a feedback loop than a story. Obama's not Keith Richards.

Finally, lost in the furor is this important quote: "he wasn’t a drug addict or dealer. He was a kid searching for answers and a place who had made some mistakes." Ah, where are the Shaheens of yesteryear?