In an era where candidates choose a necktie and suit colors and hairstyles — and just about everything else superficial — based on focus groups, a front page photo spread of Barack Obama dragging on a Marlboro, would certainly give the image consultant on the campaign trail a heart attack.
Maybe not. Some election watchers think an occasional story about a candidate with a vice could be a good thing for a campaign. Michael Schaffer writes in the New Republic:
"In an age when too many politicians come off as blow-dried confections whose every decision is based on some calculus of future advancement, a public image can actually be helped by the occasional evidence of vice — at least the variety of it that doesn't involve interns, pages or choked mistresses."
Perhaps stories of Obama's rumored vice without the attached photographic evidence will help him to pull off of the balancing act of being presidential while maintaining some down-to-earth appeal. Most candidates these days just do it by going without a necktie.
Not everyone in his party may be so accommodating. Hillary Clinton, who forced the first ban on smoking in the White House, stands in his way. And next door in the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi is fresh off of banning smoking in the speaker's lobby — the smoke-filled back room to end them all.
In the end there are much more important issues on the table than smoking as we pick the 44th president. Terrorism comes to mind. But while we still have at least a dozen men — and a woman slogging it out towards Iowa, which is still a full year away — it provides a little fodder for the pundits and a distraction for the masses.
I'm sure at least one campaign will be conducting a public opinion poll on presidential puffing within the week.