Then again his taste could be Salems or even, “Joe Camel” Camels?

This news from Jake Trapper is a bit petty, but it does continue the thread that Obama leads a double life.

“Last August, I ran into Sen. Barack Obama, D-Illinois, outside the Senate chamber in the Capitol.

This was before the Obama surge, before he had omnipresent Secret Service agents, back when you might see him strolling solo.

We chatted for a second, mainly about the Pakistan speech he’d recently given and about how the media had covered it. He was in good spirits.

As any close friend or family member can attest, I have an unusually keen sense of smell and immediately I smelled cigarette smoke on Obama. Frankly, he reeked of cigarettes.

Obama ran off before I could ask him if he’d just snuck a smoke, so I called his campaign.

They denied it. He’d quit months before, in February, they insisted. He chewed nicorette.

But I knew what I’d smelled and I asked his campaign to double-check and to ask him if he’d had a cigarette.

They reported back that he had told them he hadn’t had a cigarette since he quit.

And maybe that was true. Maybe I imagined the cigarette smoke. My olfactory nerve somehow misfired.

Except‚Ķ.last night on MSNBC’s Hardball, Obama admitted that his attempt to wean himself from the vile tobacco weed had not been entirely successful.

‚ÄúI fell off the wagon a couple times during the course of it, and then was able to get back on,” he said. “But it is a struggle like everything else.‚Äù

I quit smoking twice. After 15 years I quit for 12 years, then fell off and went back to the demon tobbacco for about a year before quitting again. I’ve now been clean for three years.

It’s a struggle to quit for sure. But again, with Obama the point is magnafied and significant as this is just one of many instances where his “words” don’t match the “substance”. “There’s the super articulate, mesmorizing ’savor’ that Oprah says “He da man!”, and then there’s the real Obama. Crankly, fact challenged and now…..smoke filled.