WHEN BARACK Obama did his last medical check-up in February he was pronounced fit but told to “continue smoking cessation efforts”. Now, according to White House spokesman Robert Gibbs, the president has been off his 30-year cigarette habit for nine months. Or at least, as Gibbs put it, with an eye to not lying to the press, “I’ve not seen or witnessed evidence of any smoking in probably nine months”.
A suggestion, perhaps a bit disloyally, that his boss might still be assiduously covering up the occasional lapses he confessed to last year, not least from wife Michelle who is reported to have made quitting a condition of her support for his presidential bid. “Do I want him to stop completely? “Absolutely’’, she told journalists last year. “And I will push him to do so, but its a process.”
It is “not something that he’s proud of. He knows that it’s not good for him. He ... doesn’t like children to know about it, obviously, including his,” Gibbs said.
To give Obama the benefit of the doubt, as he munches away on his nicotine chewing gum, that’s not bad at all for a man who works an 80- to 90-hour week and has literally every excuse, every crisis, in the world to justify the tobacco crutch. Among political leaders closer to home, he joins recent quitter, British prime minister David Cameron, on the high moral ground as role models, while Taoiseach Brian Cowen and Cameron’s deputy, Nick Clegg, who recently nominated cigarettes as his desert island luxury, continue to puff away.
Obama’s news came as the US Surgeon General produced yet another 700-page report recording that cigarettes kill 443,000 people every year in the US – one in every five people who die. Cigarette smoke, it confirms, causes immediate damage to a person’s lungs and DNA even in small amounts, including from second-hand smoke. In Ireland some 7,000 people die from smoking- related disease every year, the single most important preventable cause of illness and death, at €1 billion a year in healthcare costs.
Smoking remains largely the only blemish in what appears to be a super-fit president who exercises every day and plays basketball and golf. The February check-up did, however, also highlight an elevated cholesterol level. The White House blamed the blip on easy access to pie, noting that Obama “loves the pastry chef”. When he’s out of town he’s also been known, like Bill Clinton, to order takeaway cheeseburgers with an order of “don’t tell Michelle” on the side. We are all human.