Barack Obama admits: ‘I did inhale’

Barack Obama is confessing again: he did  "inhale". And he did "think about girls a lot". Campaigning in New Hampshire, the state which holds the first Democratic primary in January, he told a group of students at Manchester Central High School that he had been a "goof-off" during his own school days. "My Mom reminds me of that," he said. "You know, I made some bad decisions that I've actually written about. You know, got into drinking, experimented with drugs. Man, I wasted a lot of time."

Campaign watchers assume that Obama jumped on the chance for some public confessing to de-fang reports that the rival Hillary Clinton campaign has a scandal up its sleeve. What could he be hiding? In his memoir Dreams of My Father, the candidate who still has the best chance of challenging Hillary for the presidential nomination confessed to using cocaine when he could "afford it" as well as smoking dope and boozing. "Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final fatal role of the young would-be black man," he wrote.

These confessions are a risk, but they help separate him from the Clintons, notorious for never quite admitting anything. It was in New Hampshire back in 1992 that Bill Clinton parsed his own flirtation with drugs by claiming that he "didn't inhale", and Bill and Hillary glossed over the "bimbo eruptions" by keeping the infidelity count to one, Jennifer Flowers. ·