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Opinion: Obama Lights Up A Room -- And a Cig?

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The first campaign promise Barack Obama made was to his wife, who insisted that if he were going to run for president, he would stop smoking.

When the candidate’s wife goes on ``60 Minutes’’ and asks the nation’s help in keeping her husband on the non-smoking wagon, something’s going on. Michelle Obama told the audience, ``Please, America, watch. Keep an eye on him, and call me if you see him smoking.”

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Might as well put a bumper sticker on the candidate’s black SUV reading: ``How’s my smoking? Call 1 800 xxx xxxx.’’

A husband and father who smokes -- I can understand her worry and her distaste for the habit. I persuaded my father to stop smoking.

My mother still puffs away. But so does Laura Bush. So does Arnold Schwarzenegger. A smoking candidate could play big in the Tobacco Belt.

What I wonder is whether stopping her husband from smoking was Michelle Obama’s only agenda.

Campaigning is a strenuous and stressful affair. And, as has been pointed out often of late, anyone who tries to give up smoking can be cranky and edgy. People like that make mistakes. Flagrant mistakes in front of the inevitable TV camera or video-phone have been known to force a man off the presidential hustings.

So what I want to know is, is Michelle Obama hoping -- with only the most loving and tender of motives -- that her husband has a ``Macaca moment’’ -- a slip, a verbal misstep that’s the product of a nicotine plunge? Not too bad to ruin his political future, but enough to sideline him for 2008? And, incidentally get him once and for all off the stuff that King James I of England ranted against as ``a custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the news, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs’’?

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