The MSM is working itself into a lather over Democrat wunderkind Barack Obama again. Now that Obama’s a likely presidential or vice-presidential candidate for 2008, the media is now delving into his past. His waaaay past.

As in eleven years ago.

That’s when the junior Senator from Illinois wrote a memoir that has repeatedly been on the NY Times Bestseller list, a book in which he acknowledged using marijuana and cocaine following his father’s death. Rather than castigating him, a la George W. Bush’s admission of past alcohol abuse and allegations of cocaine use, or acting all shocked and awed as they did when Clinton admitted he’d smoked pot but never inhaled, the MSM is hailing Obama for his candor.

The recent publicity around Sen. Barack Obama has pushed his name up the list of presidential front-runners, but his memoir of 11 years ago, in which Obama admits to using marijuana and cocaine, could push Americans to rethink what’s acceptable in a presidential candidate.

A top Democratic prospect for the 2008 White House, Obama wrote about himself in “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance.”

“Junkie. Pothead. That’s where I’d been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. … I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind,” he wrote in the book.

Curiously, the MSM seems to believe these kind of admissions may trigger a “new era” in politics, one in which past foibles don’t matter so much, yet that very hopefulness underscores yet again how out of touch the MSM has grown. After all, both Clinton and Bush won their elections handily, thus proving that voters never really did care about past indiscretions in the first place.

As we say in the blogosphere, that news is so yesterday. Or, in this case, so 11 years ago.