I was thinking back to the campaign today, and I started to think about a weird issue that really didn't get much play. Why wasn't the fact that President Obama still smokes (or, at least, did during the campaign) a much bigger deal than it was?
It seems to me that this could have been a real area for the Republicans to make some hay. I could walk around all day long and not be able to find a single person who cares about William Ayres, or Jeremiah Wright; by the same token, I probably wouldn't have to leave the room before I found someone who is totally repulsed by cigarette smoking.
I saw a government official the other day declare publicly that "cigarette smoking has no place in Illinois." This is a sentiment that is reflected around the nation. So it makes me wonder -- why didn't they go after him more aggressively on this issue.
Even beyond the fact that he smokes from time to time, which could be (and has been) laughed off as sort of inconsequential, is the fact that he's reportedly tried to quit a number of times and has been unsuccessful. I recall reading an article wherein he said that Michelle told him he had to quit smoking if he wanted to run for President. Again, this is a place where it seems like the Republicans could have scored. Maybe not with a formal attack, but they could have certainly raised these sorts of questions in the media. "Do you want your commander-in-chief to be fiending for a smoke in the Sit Room?"
I believe that there's a number of reasons that the Republicans didn't go after Obama on this. They clearly didn't want to have a debate about health, given their candidate's own health concerns. The cigarette lobby had something to do with it, I'm sure, as did the fact that a lot of smokers vote for Republicans, and it's hard to make one smoker feel bad without making them all feel bad.
I was amazed at the casual nature of the treatment of these issues, even after Obama was elected President. Tom Brokaw gave him a hard time about it recently, but that's pretty much all that I saw. At the end of the day, though, I think this was a missed opportunity for the Republicans, and man am I glad that it was.