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First Puff: Obama, it seems, has yet to kick the habit

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Published: June 23, 2009

WASHINGTON

President Obama seems to have broken one of his first campaign promises: to kick his cigarette habit.

Although he agreed to quit smoking if his wife, Michelle, allowed him to run for the White House, the president acknowledged yesterday that it's been a challenge to stay away from cigarettes that have been part of his life, off and on, for the past 30 years.

As he signed the nation's toughest anti-smoking law yesterday aimed at keeping thousands of teens from getting hooked, Obama ruefully touched on the habit he began years ago.

"I was one of these teenagers," he said. "And so I know how difficult it can be to break this habit when it's been with you for a long time."

And though Obama praised the historic legislation, which gives the Food and Drug Administration unprecedented authority to regulate what goes into tobacco products, he didn't say how his own struggle was coming along since he moved into the White House.

Aides, again, followed the boss's lead.

White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said he hadn't asked Obama about his smoking and made it clear that he didn't plan to. The presidential spokesman stuck to vague language that left the impression that Obama still occasionally falls off the wagon, but he did not say so directly.

"I don't, honestly, see the need to get a whole lot more specific than the fact that it's a continuing struggle," Gibbs said. "He struggles with it every day."

It was a struggle that predated his campaign -- and almost blocked it.

While he and Michelle Obama discussed whether the then-senator from Illinois should consider a White House run, she made him promise the family he would put down his lighter if they were to head out on the campaign trail.

"I hate it," Michelle Obama told CBS' 60 Minutes during the presidential campaign's early days. "That's why he doesn't do it anymore, I'm proud to say. I outed him -- I'm the one who outed him on the smoking. That was one of my prerequisites for, you know, entering this race is that, you know, he couldn't be a smoking president."

Well, not exactly.

During Obama's two-year White House bid, he was known to occasionally bum a cigarette from a staff member -- while also making sure to emphasize his efforts to stop for good and his progress from his one-time five-smoke-a-day average.

During yesterday's bill signing, Obama focused on how the new law would help keep future generations of kids away from the dangerous habit.

The president mentioned his own experience very briefly -- just 30 words.

"I don't know what the appropriate word count would have been in order to check the box," Gibbs said when asked about the brevity of comments. "And, again, I think the president spoke about this in personal terms, regardless of the word count."

Obama has veered between frank and cagey about his personal battle with smoking. He has often acknowledged since that he has "fallen off the wagon." But he hardly ever provides specifics.

White House aides refuse to give a clear answer to the question of whether the president still sneaks a smoke now and again. Still, it's not as if Obama was ever even a pack-a-day puffer.

"I've never been a heavy smoker ...," Obama told The Chicago Tribune in 2007. "I've been chewing Nicorette strenuously."