Obama praised the historic legislation, which gives the Food and Drug
Administration unprecedented authority to regulate what goes into tobacco
products, to make public the ingredients and to prohibit marketing campaigns
geared toward children.
But he didn't say how his own struggle was coming since he moved into the
White House. And aides were no more forthcoming.
As senator, candidate and now president, Obama has veered between frank and
cagey about his personal battle with smoking.
He promised his wife, Michelle, more than two years ago that he would quit
if she let him seek the White House.
He has often acknowledged since that he has "fallen off the
wagon." But he hardly ever provides specifics. And though White House
aides pack nicotine gum in their jackets to help him resist, they also refuse
to give a clear answer to the question of whether the president still sneaks a
smoke now and again.
"I hate it," Michelle Obama told CBS' "60 Minutes"
during the presidential campaign's early days. "That's why he doesn't do
it anymore, I'm proud to say. I outed him — I'm the one who outed him on the
smoking. That was one of my prerequisites for, you know, entering this race is
that, you know, he couldn't be a smoking president."
Well, not exactly.
During Obama's two-year White House bid, he was known to occasionally bum a
cigarette from a staff member — while also making sure to emphasize his efforts
to stop for good and his progress from his onetime five-smoke-a-day average.
During Monday's bill signing, Obama focused on how the new law would help
keep future generations of kids away from the dangerous habit. The president mentioned
his own experience very briefly — just 30 words.
Almost 90 percent of people who smoke began at 18 or younger, he said.
"I know. I was one of these teenagers," he said. "And so I
know how difficult it can be to break this habit when it's been with you for a
long time."
And then he went back to the merits of the bill and the shortcomings of the
tobacco industry, which he accused of targeting young people. One key provision
in the new law bans candy-flavored cigarettes and the use of other flavored smokes
that might appeal to teenagers. Ads aimed at young people also are banned.
Aides refused to elaborate on his own situation.
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said he hadn't asked Obama about
his smoking and made plain that he didn't plan to. The presidential spokesman
stuck to vague language that left the impression Obama still occasionally falls
off the wagon, but he did not say so directly.
"I don't, honestly, see the need to get a whole lot more specific than
the fact that it's a continuing struggle," Gibbs said. "He struggles
with it everyday."
Still, it's not as if Obama was ever even a pack-a-day puffer.
"I've never been a heavy smoker," Obama told The Chicago Tribune
in 2007. "I've quit periodically over the last several years. I've got an
ironclad demand from my wife that in the stresses of the campaign I don't
succumb. I've been chewing Nicorette strenuously."
______
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