Alt head: "To set a good example for the children, we must lie about our pasts."

This is not a signature.

Romney will change his mind about talking about past youthful indiscretions.  Then we'll finally hear about his coffee experimentation during the 60s.

It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine

A candidate has two choices when asked about past indiscretions: lie or tell the truth. There's a downside to either one.

If a candidate lies and says "Nope, I never smoked the stuff, never drank, never had sex outside of marriage, and spent all my spare time as a youth reading to the blind. Then every journalist and opposition researcher is going to spring into action to find that one time the candidate drank from the wrong punchbowl at a PTA meeting and passed out on the lawn. The incident will be trumpeted by the opposition as evidence of a Keith Richards-level drug addiction that continues to the present day. The candidate will be further lambasted for not being completely forthcoming with the American People and various pundits will question what else s/he's lied about.

Conversely, the candidate can tell the truth:

Answer #1:
"Yup, I smoked the chronic a little bit back in college. I even did a few lines one night at a party after I found out I scored a 170 on the LSAT. The headache I had the next morning was enough to convince me that drugs were a complete waste of time and that if I wanted to do anything with my life I needed to buckle down and leave that foolishness behind. Haven't touched the stuff since."  

Answer #2:
"Yup, I rocked the bong for about a year and a half in high school. Then my Dad caught me and gave me the whuppin' of a lifetime. He grounded me for six months and I spent every night sitting at the kitchen table studying and every weekend mowing the lawn, cleaning rain gutters, and whatever horrible chore my Dad could come up with. Scared the hell out of me. Ten years later I smelled some weed at a Springsteen concert and I started looking around for my Dad because I was sure he was going to show up and ground me and my wife. Looking back, it was the best thing he could have done for me and my son knows that the same thing'll happen to him if I catch him smoking weed."

The admission will be trumpeted by the opposition as evidence of a Keith Richards-level drug addiction that continues to the present day. The candidate will be further lambasted for setting a bad example for kids by, uh... telling the truth.

See? It's a no-win situation. I don't care if Obama partied a little in college. I only care about being consistent. If Mitt Romney actually believes that drinking and drug use in one's twenties disqualifies a person from holding public office, then he shouldn't have endorsed George W. Bush for President. But then, Romney doesn't seem to care about the actual act, it's how it's presented that's important:

"I think in order to leave the best possible example for our kids, we're probably wisest not to talk about our own indiscretions in great detail," Romney said.

See, it's OK as long as you don't tell anyone.

-=Logan
Research, facts, a Republican needs not these things.

    Once you get past the pot smoking (something that many politicians have managed to do), I suspect the real reason behind this candor right now has more to do with the last days of the 2000 election. Remember the Bush DUI revelation? Much of the talk at the time was over whether or not this was a dirty trick (as if revealing something in the public record counts), but only later was the effect at the polls discussed and dissected. Charlie Cook, among others, came to the conclusion that this might have cost Bush up to 2-3% at the polls, though factoring in the normal tightening in the last weekend makes this a less than scientific conclusion. Imagine, no Florida recount, and maybe even two or three more states in the Electoral College final tally. A huge blow to a presidency over such a minor incident.
    What all the analysts and observers could agree upon, though, was some puzzlement over why Bush's team ever allowed this to become an issue in the first place. W was already pitching the "I've made mistakes but changed my ways" story to the voters, and it seems certain that revealing this screw up would have been a blip on the radar if it had come out in late 1999. (Speculations as to why this didn't happen will likely depend on how you feel about the Shrub in the first place.)
   Since Obama had already hinted at drug use in his biography- and there are probably several witnesses still out there- he's just doing the politically practical move and trying to defuse the story before voters really start paying attention next summer. Will it work? Most likely. The objections, stated or otherwise, to Obama becoming president are so much stronger than smoking dope for a couple years that this will only reinforce already reached opinions. (Ugh, what a sentence. Damn this cold . . . )
   

Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras

A presidential candidate is accusing a fellow presidential candidate of being too honest.

Its almost as if with the writers strike, reality has begun writing the jokes for us.

Memory is a strange bell, jubilee and knell.