We should stop putting pressure on Obama to quit smoking so that he can focus on a few other important matters, writes Ann Marie Hourihane
HANDS UP anyone who thinks that Barack Obama should quit smoking in the New Year. Anybody? Thought not. Barack has promised to quit but he has quite a lot on in the New Year, what with leading the Free World, reinventing capitalism and trying to pull us all back from the abyss. And he has to look after us political orphans who have no leaders to call our own and so have landed, both economically and emotionally, on his presidential doorstep as a couple of million political foundlings.
Everyone else should give up smoking in the New Year - if they have plenty of nicotine replacement therapy and a rigorous exercise regime organised. But the thing about Barack Obama is that he has both the nicotine replacement therapy and the rigorous exercise regime in place already. Reporters saw him chewing nicotine gum on the campaign trail during the election - how strangely long ago that all seems now. And he goes to the gym six days a week already. In fact, apart from the smoking, the worst thing that US doctors can find to say about Barack Obama is that he seems a bit obsessional about exercise.
It is true that the US President-elect did give an interview to Men's Healthmagazine in which he discussed how he alternates cardio-vascular work with lifting weights; which proved to be a little too much information for the male population of the Anglophone world. We all experience President Envy when we look at Obama, but for men Obama is particularly tough: handsome, clever, hot wife, leader of the Free World, real credentials as a social activist, good writer, receptacle of all our hopes, daughters who are still adoring, pretty good at basketball and guaranteed a very hefty income for the rest of his life.
And last week he agreed - indeed, volunteered - to spend $10 billion on pre-school education.
It's not that the importance of pre-school education has not been acknowledged before. The work of the economist James J Heckman, which showed that every dollar spent on pre-school care saves the state an enormous amount of money in later spending on prisons, looking after teenage mothers and dealing with the social consequences of drug abuse. It's just that this is the first time that anyone with real power has shown that they give a damn about it.
Obama mentioned his pre-school programme twice in the presidential debates, apparently. The mother of his close friend and senior adviser, Valerie Jarret, is an expert on the subject. And Chicago has a charitable foundation specialising in child development issues which is funded by a philanthropist called Irving B Harris. The foundation is called, interestingly enough, An Ounce Of Prevention. Clever millionaires like Warren Buffet and Bill Gates have also put money into pre-school education.
It really is mortifying, when you think how patronising and indeed hostile the Irish left is about the US, to discover from the New York Timesthat the state of Georgia offered free pre-kindergarten classes to all four year olds way back in 1995. One of the first tasks of Obama's new secretary of education, Arne Duncan, formerly the Chicago schools superintendent, will be to co-ordinate the US's disparate and fragmented pre-school education programmes. But it is worth noting that the total amount spent by all states on pre-school education in 2007 was $3.7 billion, which denotes some effort, at least.
So this initiative is not revolutionary. It is just the size of it, the commitment of it, the imagination of it which is new. The Obama people have costed that every dollar spent on pre-school education will save the American tax payer $7 to $10 in the long run. And what if it doesn't? What if the economist James J Heckman is wrong, like all economists, and pre-school education does not save the taxpayer any money at all? Well, then, some little children - and not all of them poor, either - are going to have some good times and some care that they would not have otherwise enjoyed. The programme includes raising the number of home visits to low-income mothers who are raising children alone: just the type of mothers who have been in the British news recently for outrageous acts of violence against their children. No one in Ireland, of course, knows how our at-risk children and their mothers are doing.
This is a real attack on poverty and on avoidable human suffering. It surely comes from Obama's experiences working in Chicago's poorest areas, as chronicled in his book Dreams From My Father. (Besides everything else Obama is a good read. I'll stop myself right there.) When asked if this was really the time for the US economy to take on a further expense of $10 billion, a spokesperson Jen Psaki replied: "We simply cannot afford to sideline key priorities like education".
So there you have it. There is a political administration in the world that is prepared to contemplate the idea that a nation's children - and their parents - are as almost as important as its banks.
Obama claims that he was on eight cigarettes per day. Now he's on even fewer than that, bumming just a couple from friends. I say, let him smoke as much as he likes. Happy Christmas.