Pundit puffery

ABC's Jake Tapper is mad because he feels lied to by the Barack Obama campaign. He thought he smelled smoke on the candidate at a time when Obama had supposedly quit cigarettes. Tapper asked the campaign if Obama had fallen off the nicotine wagon and was assured that was not the case. But then the candidate later admitted to Chris Matthews that he had slipped a time or two:

It's not a big deal in the scheme of things -- the war on Iraq, a major economic crisis -- indeed, it's miniscule. Hardly worth mentioning.

Except that I don't like feeling that I wasn't being dealt with honestly. And as much as citizens who are suspect of the media might scoff at such a notion, many of us consider ourselves to be your representatives to help make sure our leaders are telling us the truth, and leading the country down a path we're confident is the right one. (Corny, I know.)

Yeah, corny, and more than a little self-involved. Why is that everybody who starts a blog, even supposedly world-weary journalists, suddenly begin thinking everything is about them (except me of course)?

The smoking thing actually makes Obama seem a little more human and a little less mythic. He has a weakness he struggles with, and lies about it from time to time, to others and probably to himself: This is just a little setback. I can really quit anytime I want to. I've never fully trusted anybody who was never addicted to anything -- this almost makes up for the pathetic bowling. This doesn't make Obama any more qualified to be president, but it does make him seem more like somebody you'd like to hang out and shoot the breeze with.