Obama’s pot problem

Will the president's tough stance on marijuana cost him the crucial swing state of Colorado?

Topics: Barack Obama, marijuana, Colorado,

Obama's pot problemA crowd of people all exhale marijuana simultaneously at the University of Colorado in Boulder on April 20, 2010. (Credit: Reuters/Mark Leffingwell)

President Barack Obama has disappointed drug-reform advocates across the country since taking office as president, and nowhere do they feel more betrayed than in Colorado.

After holding the party convention in Denver and handily carrying this traditionally Republican state in 2008, Obama could be jeopardizing his reelection bid with a dismissive and even hostile approach to marijuana reform, a top issue for tens of thousands of local residents, including many of the activists who powered his last campaign.

Obama inspired hope with early signals on relaxing drug policy, including the October 2009 “Ogden memo” that said the U.S. would not prosecute in states that allow medical marijuana. In the past two years, however, the feds have targeted medical marijuana facilities with a record number of raids, putting Obama on course to surpass the previous high set by George W. Bush. In Colorado alone, 40 dispensaries — all in compliance with state and local law — have already been shut down this year.

The surprising about-face has inspired former supporters in Colorado to try to legalize the drug outright. They managed to get a proposition to that effect on the ballot this November, and while some are (not unreasonably) teasing the possibility that the initiative, Amendment 64, might help the president by bringing a younger, more liberal electorate out to the polls, there are also warning signs that many of these same voters won’t pull the lever for Obama in a crucial swing state.

“The element that nobody’s really talking about is what I call the Gary Johnson effect,” says Denver Democratic political consultant Rick Ridder.

Johnson, the former Republican governor of New Mexico running for president on the Libertarian ticket, has begun holding press conferences from medical marijuana dispensaries and assailing Obama for waging the war on drugs. When combined with the steady drip of news about the latest massive DEA raids on what many local Democrats consider legitimate small-business owners, his presence in Colorado is poised to cause some headaches for the White House as campaign season heats up.



“Obama’s got a bloody nose all over this,” Johnson told me in an interview. “There’s a huge crowd out there that we should be able to appeal to.”

Polls show the president with a small but stable advantage in Colorado over Republican nominee Mitt Romney, but local political observers say his advisors are kidding themselves if they think they have much breathing room, and that it will be a much tighter spread than in 2008, when Obama won by a 9-point margin.

“Obama on his best day is at 45 or 47 percent out here,” says longtime Colorado pollster Floyd Ciruli. He thinks the marijuana initiative, support for which has ranged from 46 to 61 percent in polls (depending on how the question is asked), may well do better than the president in November and that Democrats “can’t take that vote for granted.”

And conversations with a wide range of local activists and political insiders suggest it’s not just votes Obama risks hemorrhaging with his regressive pot stance, but campaign donations and volunteers as well.

“I volunteered for his campaign, primarily because he said he was going to respect state marijuana laws,” says Josh Kappel, a Denver attorney who works at Sensible Colorado, a marijuana reform group at the forefront of the legalization effort. He’s yet to decide whether to vote for or volunteer for the president again, waiting to gauge the administration’s actions between now and Election Day. Talk of Gary Johnson is in the air, he says.

Wanda James, a Democratic fundraiser who bundled $100,000 for Obama’s 2008 campaign while serving on his national finance committee, runs an edible marijuana business in the state. She is so outraged at the White House that she “won’t raise a dime” for his reelection.

“There’s a number of major donors that have felt that way — people who’ve given over a million dollars,” she told me.

James, who briefly helmed Rep. Jared Polis’ primary campaign in 2008, urged caution against what she acknowledged was a growing level of support for the third-party candidate in response to the Obama administration’s aggression.

“I think a lot of people are trying to support Gary Johnson, but it’s the wrong move right now,” she said. “We’ll be cutting off our nose to spite our face if we allow Romney to win this election, because it would be the end of the marijuana industry. At least under Barack Obama there is some pretense for the industry to exist.”

Johnson registered at 7 percent support in a recent Public Policy Polling survey of the state. In that poll, slightly more Johnson voters would back Romney rather than Obama were they forced to choose in a two-way race.

“I’m not claiming I have the answer [to corralling the pro-pot vote],” Johnson concedes. “Believe me, we are trying to do everything we can to make young people understand: The only way you vote for Obama if your issue is drug reform is the notion that in his second term as opposed to his first, he’s going to do the right thing. I’ve heard that argument many times by many politicians.”

Whether it helps Obama or hurts him, the pot issue certainly won’t play to Romney’s advantage in any direct sense. The guy is the archetypal narc, a Mormon who harangued a neighbor for smoking on the beach outside his mansion in San Diego and impersonated a police officer more than once as a young man, playing pranks on his friends by pulling them over with a siren mounted on his car.

“People who turn out for Amendment 64 are very unlikely to pull the lever for Romney,” says Aaron Houston, executive director of Students for Sensible Drug Policy. “He used to dress up as a cop!”

But Houston, a Colorado native and former Democratic Party operative in this libertarian-leaning state, says Johnson’s candidacy represents “a very real danger for Obama” in that it is poised to siphon votes off at the margins, potentially making it easier for Romney to inch his way toward plurality support.

“He’s going to have to be very careful that his Department of Justice doesn’t threaten the voters of Colorado that they’ll have U.S. attorneys in federal court trying to undo the will of the voters [if the ballot initiative passes],” he says. “If he does, it could be fatal for his chances of reelection, because one thing Coloradans really don’t like is the federal government telling them what to do.”

If he fails to budge on pot between now and Election Day, Obama will effectively be wagering that Willard Mitt Romney is so terrifying to the pro-pot community that its voters will choose the devil they know over the one they don’t.

Matt Taylor is a Brooklyn-based writer whose political reporting has appeared in Slate, The Daily Beast, The New Republic, The Atlantic, NYMag.com, Capital New York, and VICE, among other publications. You can follow him on Twitter at @matthewt_ny.

Featured Slide Shows

  • Share on Twitter
  • Share on Facebook
  • 1 of 11
  • Close
  • Fullscreen
  • Thumbnails

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    Beautiful Darkness by Fabien Vehlmann & Kerascoët
    Kerascoët's lovely, delicate pen-and-watercolor art -- all intricate botanicals, big eyes and flowing hair -- gives this fairy story a deceptively pretty finish. You find out quickly, however, that these are the heartless and heedless fairies of folk legend, not the sentimental sprites beloved by the Victorians and Disney fans. A host of tiny hominid creatures must learn to survive in the forest after fleeing their former home -- a little girl who lies dead in the woods. The main character, Aurora, tries to organize the group into a community, but most of her cohort is too capricious, lazy and selfish to participate for long. There's no real moral to this story, which is refreshing in itself, beyond the perpetual lessons that life is hard and you have to be careful whom you trust. Never has ugly truth been given a prettier face.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    Climate Changed: A Personal Journey Through the Science by Philippe Squarzoni
    Squarzoni is a French cartoonist who makes nonfiction graphic novels about contemporary issues and politics. While finishing up a book about France under Jacques Chirac, he realized that when it came to environmental policy, he didn't know what he was talking about. "Climate Changed" is the result of his efforts to understand what has been happening to the planet, a striking combination of memoir and data that ruminates on a notoriously elusive, difficult and even imponderable subject. Panels of talking heads dispensing information (or Squarzoni discussing the issues with his partner) are juxtaposed with detailed and meticulous yet lyrical scenes from the author's childhood, the countryside where he takes a holiday and a visit to New York. He uses his own unreachable past as a way to grasp the imminent transformation of the Earth. The result is both enlightening and unexpectedly moving.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    Here by Richard McGuire
    A six-page version of this innovative work by a regular contributor to the New Yorker first appeared in RAW magazine 25 years ago. Each two-page spread depicts a single place, sometimes occupied by a corner of a room, over the course of 4 billion years. The oldest image is a blur of pink and purple gases; others depict hazmat-suited explorers from 300 years in the future. Inset images show the changing decor and inhabitants of the house throughout its existence: family photos, quarrels, kids in Halloween costumes, a woman reading a book, a cat walking across the floor. The cumulative effect is serene and ravishing, an intimation of the immensity of time and the wonder embodied in the humblest things.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    Kill My Mother by Jules Feiffer
    The legendary Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist delivers his debut graphic novel at 85, a deliriously over-the-top blend of classic movie noir and melodrama that roams from chiaroscuro Bay City to Hollywood to a USO gig in the Pacific theater of World War II. There's a burnt-out drunk of a private eye, but the story is soon commandeered by a multigenerational collection of ferocious women, including a mysterious chanteuse who never speaks, a radio comedy writer who makes a childhood friend the butt of a hit series and a ruthless dame intent on making her whiny coward of a husband into a star. There are disguises, musical numbers and plenty of gunfights, but the drawing is the main attraction. Nobody convey's bodies in motion more thrillingly than Feiffer, whether they're dancing, running or duking it out. The kid has promise.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis
    This is a weird one, but in the nervy surreal way that word-playful novels like "A Clockwork Orange" or "Ulysses" are weird. The main character, a teenage schoolboy named Scarper Lee, lives in a world where it rains knives and people make their own parents, contraptions that can be anything from a tiny figurine stashable in a pocket to biomorphic boiler-like entities that seem to have escaped from Dr. Seuss' nightmares. Their homes are crammed with gadgets they call gods and instead of TV they watch a hulu-hoop-size wheel of repeating images that changes with the day of the week. They also know their own "death day," and Scarper's is coming up fast. Maybe that's why he runs off with the new girl at school, a real troublemaker, and the obscurely dysfunctional Castro, whose mother is a cageful of talking parakeets. A solid towline of teenage angst holds this manically inventive vision together, and proves that some graphic novels can rival the text-only kind at their own game.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    NOBROW 9: It's Oh So Quiet
    For each issue, the anthology magazine put out by this adventurous U.K.-based publisher of independent graphic design, illustration and comics gives 45 artists a four-color palette and a theme. In the ninth issue, the theme is silence, and the results are magnificent and full of surprises. The comics, each told in images only, range from atmospheric to trippy to jokey to melancholy to epic to creepy. But the two-page illustrations are even more powerful, even if it's not always easy to see how they pertain to the overall concept of silence. Well, except perhaps for the fact that so many of them left me utterly dumbstruck with visual delight.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    Over Easy by Mimi Pond
    When Pond was a broke art student in the 1970s, she took a job at a neighborhood breakfast spot in Oakland, a place with good food, splendid coffee and an endlessly entertaining crew of short-order cooks, waitresses, dishwashers and regular customers. This graphic memoir, influenced by the work of Pond's friend, Alison Bechdel, captures the funky ethos of the time, when hippies, punks and disco aficionados mingled in a Bay Area at the height of its eccentricity. The staff of the Imperial Cafe were forever swapping wisecracks and hopping in and out of each other's beds, which makes them more or less like every restaurant team in history. There's an intoxicating esprit de corps to a well-run everyday joint like the Imperial Cafe, and never has the delight in being part of it been more winningly portrayed.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    The Shadow Hero by Gene Luen Yang and Sonny Liew
    You don't have to be a superhero fan to be utterly charmed by Yang and Liew's revival of a little-known character created in the 1940s by the cartoonist Chu Hing. This version of the Green Turtle, however, is rich in characterization, comedy and luscious period detail from the Chinatown of "San Incendio" (a ringer for San Francisco). Hank, son of a mild-mannered grocer, would like to follow in his father's footsteps, but his restless mother (the book's best character and drawn with masterful nuance by Liew) has other ideas after her thrilling encounter with a superhero. Yang's story effortlessly folds pathos into humor without stooping to either slapstick or cheap "darkness." This is that rare tribute that far surpasses the thing it celebrates.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    Shoplifter by Michael Cho
    Corinna Park, former English major, works, unhappily, in a Toronto advertising agency. When the dissatisfaction of the past five years begins to oppress her, she lets off steam by pilfering magazines from a local convenience store. Cho's moody character study is as much about city life as it is about Corinna. He depicts her falling asleep in front of the TV in her condo, brooding on the subway, roaming the crowded streets after a budding romance goes awry. Like a great short story, this is a simple tale of a young woman figuring out how to get her life back, but if feels as if it contains so much of contemporary existence -- its comforts, its loneliness, its self-deceptions -- suspended in wintery amber.

    Ten spectacular graphic novels from 2014

    Through the Woods by Emily Carroll
    This collection of archetypal horror, fairy and ghost stories, all about young girls, comes lushly decked in Carroll's inky black, snowy white and blood-scarlet art. A young bride hears her predecessor's bones singing from under the floorboards, two friends make the mistake of pretending to summon the spirits of the dead, a family of orphaned siblings disappears one by one into the winter nights. Carroll's color-saturated images can be jagged, ornate and gruesome, but she also knows how to chill with absence, shadows and a single staring eye. Literary readers who cherish the work of Kelly Link or the late Angela Carter's collection, "The Bloody Chamber," will adore the violent beauty on these pages.

  • Recent Slide Shows

Comments

0 Comments

Comment Preview

Your name will appear as username ( settings | log out )

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href=""> <b> <em> <strong> <i> <blockquote>