Obama’s Sordid High School Past

by Ben Shapiro

While the Washington Post has been diligently digging into relatively innocent high school pranks by Mitt Romney, they’ve spent the last few years diligently ignoring President Obama’s far more controversial high school days.

Obama, by all accounts, was a habitual drug user in high school. He tried cocaine, he admits in Dreams From My Father; he “tried drugs enthusiastically.” The Chicago Tribune reported back in 2007 that Obama thanked the “Choom Gang” in his high school yearbook; “chooming” was Hawaiian slang for smoking pot. The Honolulu Advertiser reported that Obama’s senior portrait “prominently displayed … A package of ‘Zig-Zag’ rolling papers and a matchbook.” One of Obama’s close friends was arrested for drug possession during high school.

In his memoir, Obama talked about routinely getting high. “Junkie. Pothead,” he wrote. “That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man.” But, according to Obama, he only got high because he was contemplating deep matters: drugs could “push questions of who I was out of my mind.”

Obama told students in 2007 that this activity constituted “goofing off” and “wasting time”:

"I will confess to you that I was kind of a goof off in high school as my mom reminded me," Obama said. "I went to high school in Hawaii, so there's a lot of opportunity to goof off because the weather is really good all the time …

"You know, I made some bad decisions …. You know, got into drinking and experimenting with drugs. There was a whole stretch of time where I didn't apply myself. It wasn't until I got out of … high school, and went to college that I started realizing, man, I wasted a lot of time.”

The New York Times, however, went out of its way to find Obama’s classmates to testify that drugs played only a “bit part” in Obama’s youth. Yet Obama would later brag on the campaign trail that he “inhaled frequently … that was the point.”

During his high school years, Obama hung out with communist radical Frank Marshall Davis; in 2007, the Los Angeles Times reported that during his high school days, “he felt the first stirrings of anger toward whites. He says he also delved into black nationalism.” He was “offended or even enraged when white classmates adopted black street slang or revealed their underlying consciousness of his race by going out of their way to tell him how much they admired a black musician or athlete.”

This activity is certainly more reflective of Obama’s ideological history than Mitt Romney’s pranks on teachers and fellow students. And as for the drug use – well, that seems just a bit more serious than walking a teacher into a door or cutting a student’s hair. But leave it to the Post to ignore or downplay all of that in favor of continuing stories about Romney’s dog, his high school hijinks, and whatever other nonsense they can use to protect President Obama from his own incompetence.