Unlike most politicians, Barack Obama wrote a fairly frank memoir — before he was a politician.

Presidential aspirants tend to write more sanitized books for use as campaign tools. [...]

But Dreams From My Father is not like that. Obama wrote the highly personal book when he was in his early 30s, after being approached by a publisher when he became the first black person elected editor of the Harvard Law Review."This is not the kind of book you would ever expect a politician to write," said GOP consultant Alex Vogel.

Now that infatuation with all things Obama is so intense, the book is a paperback bestseller, about to be re-released in hardcover with a new preface — and it is forthright about the fact that, as a confused and angry adolescent (which of course is redundant), Obama dallied with drugs.

In the book, Obama acknowledges that he used cocaine as a high school student but rejected heroin. “Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack, though,” he says.

Oops. Lois Romano in the Washington Post wonders whether the candor will come back to bite him.

It was not so long ago that such blunt admissions would have led to a candidate’s undoing, and there is uneasiness in Democratic circles that "Dreams From My Father" will provide a blueprint for negative attacks. [...]

Two decades ago, Judge Douglas H. Ginsburg of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was forced to withdraw as a nominee for the Supreme Court after reports surfaced that he had used marijuana while he was a law professor. As a presidential candidate, Bill Clinton thought marijuana use could be enough of a liability in 1992 that he felt compelled to say he had not inhaled. And President Bush has managed to deflect endless gossip about his past by acknowledging that he had an "irresponsible" youth but offering no details.

Through his book, Obama has become the first potential presidential contender to admit trying cocaine. [...]

Obama has not expressed any regrets for his candor. In a preface to the new edition, he says that he would tell the same story today “even if certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically.” [...]

“I think that, at this stage, my life is an open book, literally and figuratively,” he said. “Voters can make a judgment as to whether dumb things that I did when I was a teenager are relevant to the work that I’ve done since that time.”

Romano observes that in this pure-potential, honeymoon stage of Obama’s not-yet-candidacy,” the public seems to be enthusiastically embracing his openness.” But this may not just be a matter of giving a fair-haired favorite a free pass. In the “Purple Party” issue of New York Magazine, John Helleman provided this recipe for today’s winning “Frankencandidate” (I excerpted it here):

The candidate comes across, first and foremost, as not being completely full of shit. The journalist Joe Klein once wrote, in his guise as Anonymous, that “the handshake is the threshold act, the beginning of politics.� But today�at a moment when the national stage is cluttered with figures adept at left-right posturing but lacking utterly in authenticity�the threshold act is candor. Our man (or woman) is blunt and plainspoken, allergic to cant, averse to obfuscation. [...]

I continued quoting Helleman and commenting:

It gets better. The candidate is outspoken and plainspoken:

Thus does the candidate succeed in pissing off an assortment of muscle-bound constituencies. But he delights countless voters who crave a leader capable of surprise. Who, upon hearing yet another of his forays into the realm of the impolitic, find themselves
nodding, smiling, gasping, “I can’t believe he said that.�

He (or she — Andersen avoids politically-correct pronoun handwringing) is “recognizably human” — has flaws, an imperfect family life, has made mistakes, still sometimes makes them — and admits it, and learns from them. He knows when to say “I don’t know.” Above all, this candidate doesn’t condescend:

For the past three decades, American politics has been run by a consultantariat whose fundamental premise [...] is that voters
are entirely malleable, endlessly spinnable, infinitely manipulable. Stupid, in a word. [...]

The candidate [...] exists to test an alternative hypothesis. That the voters are more wised-up tha[n] the political professionals assume and that they can be wised-up even more. [...]

He senses that out there, on the hustings, the appetite for a grown-up conversation about where we are and where we need to go is palpable, bordering on ravenous.

Obama’s phenom status may be due to the fact that he appears to step into and fill precisely that void. American voters don’t mind human imperfection.  They mind hypocrisy and disrespect for their intelligence.  Indeed, Romano quotes "a senior Republican strategist who will be advising a GOP presidential candidate in 2008" saying that…

Obama has not yet gone through an intense vetting process and that a problem could arise if there is more to his story than he has chosen to share.

IMHO, barring any truly sordid revelation, Obama’s candor will serve him more as an asset than a liability. His drawbacks will be his inexperience, particularly his executive inexperience, and his premature overexposure. Simply by the law of gravity — what goes up must come down — the early overenthusiasm for this appealing but untested man cannot help but generate a backlash. The crush will cloy, and simply by being a real guy hailed as the incarnation of an ideal, Obama will inevitably disappoint. And I think he knows it.

(In the comments here, True Ancestor recommended Gore-Obama — which, we agreed, could truly be called The Green Ticket.)