I gotta go with Obama and Giuliani on this one

Barack Obama made headlines yesterday for admitting to some highschool students that he'd drank and used drugs when he was in high school but then turned himself around when in college. Romney jumped on this to criticize Obama's honesty with the teenagers.

“It’s just not a good idea for people running for President of the United States who potentially could be the role model for a lot of people to talk about their personal failings while they were kids because it opens the doorway to other kids thinking, ‘well I can do that too and become President of the United States,’” Romney told an Iowa audience today. “I think that was a huge error by Barack Obama…it is just the wrong way for people who want to be the leader of the free world.”

Obama had already revealed these details in his first book. Should he now deny what he wrote? Should he lie to students about his behavior? And he is giving them the hope that someone who wasted high school through bad habits could turn himself around and make something of himself. He's not telling the kids that he approves of such behavior, but being forthright with them. Romney would have done better to just have stayed away from the whole question on Obama's teenage history.

Rudy Giuliani, who has his own past bad behavior, much or it as an adult and not a teenager, defended Obama's honesty.

“I respect his honesty in doing that. I think that one of the things we need from our people who are running for office is not this pretense of perfection,” Giuliani said. “The reality is all of us that run for public office, whether its governor, legislator, mayor, president–we are all human beings. If we haven’t made mistakes don’t vote for us cause we got some big ones that are gonna happen in the future and we wont know how to handle them.”

Giuliani certainly figures that he's wrapped up the "made mistakes" vote and now seeks to turn Romney's clean image against him. That's a pretty iffy twist - vote for me because I've made more personal mistakes than the other guy. I don't think that line is going to convince many voters. But I do agree with Giuliani that it's better for candidates to be up front with the public about their past behavior. One of George W. Bush's mistakes in 2000 was not to be open with people about his past drinking and arrests for drunken driving and he paid the price when the story leaked out, as he should have known it would, right before the election.