When it came to smoking pot, the teenage Barack Obama had rules?

Bill Clinton he was not. When
it came to smoking pot, the teenage Barack Obama had rules. You had to embrace
"total absorption" or face a penalty. When you smoked in the car, "the windows
had to be rolled up." And he could horn his way in, calling out "Intercepted!"
and grab the joint out of turn.

Best-selling author David Maraniss' "Barack
Obama: The Story" describes the future president's teenage antics, notably
his copious marijuana smoking, details of which were
published early Friday by Buzzfeed. While the book won't be released until
June 19, vast sections of it were already available Friday on Google Books.

Starting on page 293, the reader begins to
get the dope on high school-age Obama's group of basketball- and fun-loving
buds, who dubbed themselves the "Choom Gang," from a verb meaning "to smoke
marijuana."

"As a member of the Choom Gang, Barry Obama was known for starting a few
pot-smoking trends. The first was called 'TA,' short for 'total absorption.' To
place this in the physical and political context of another young man who would
grow up to be president, TA was the antithesis of Bill Clinton's claim that as a
Rhodes Scholar at Oxford he smoked dope but never inhaled