by John McCormick, updated
WEST DES MOINES, Iowa — A day after Sen. Hillary Clinton’s campaign questioned Sen. Barack Obama’s ability to win a general election, the co-chairman of her New Hampshire operation today questioned his past drug use.
In an interview with the Washington Post, Billy Shaheen suggestion that Obama’s admissions about drug use as a young man could come back to haunt him in a general election.
“The Republicans are not going to give up without a fight … and one of the things they’re certainly going to jump on is his drug use,” said Shaheen, the husband of former New Hampshire governor Jeanne Shaheen.
The Post reported that Billy Shaheen contrasted Obama’s openness about his past drug use — which Obama has mentioned recently in Iowa and New Hampshire — with the approach taken by George W. Bush in 1999 and 2000, when he ruled out questions about his behavior when he was “young and irresponsible.”In recent days, the New York senator’s campaign has been pushing the notion that voters do not know that much about the junior senator from Illinois. (The Tribune ran an eight-part series on his biography earlier this year.)
Obama used both cocaine and marijuana as a young man. He wrote about it in one of his books and has talked about it several times on network television and on the campaign trail. Obama joked about it just a few weeks ago in Iowa.
Shaheen told the Post that Obama’s candor on the subject would “open the door” to further questions. “It’ll be, ‘When was the last time? Did you ever give drugs to anyone? Did you sell them to anyone?'” Shaheen said. “There are so many openings for Republican dirty tricks. It’s hard to overcome.”
Obama campaign manager David Plouffe issued the following statement in response:
“Hillary Clinton said attacking other Democrats is the ‘fun part’ of this campaign, and now she’s moved from Barack Obama’s kindergarten years to his teenage years in an increasingly desperate effort to slow her slide in the polls. Senator Clinton’s campaign is recycling old news that Barack Obama has been candid about in a book he wrote years ago, and he’s talked about the lessons he’s learned from these mistakes with young people all across the country. He plans on winning this campaign by focusing on the issues that actually matter to the American people.”