As the Obama campaign appears to gain momentum, the Senator has been reluctant to support any change in the way recreational marijuana users are treated by the criminal justice system. Given Obama's past sympathy for marijuana reform, it's a pretty safe bet that his current position is politically calculated. But what if he's making the wrong calculations?

As SSDP's Tom Angell explains in this LTE, actual public support for marijuana decriminalization simply defies conventional political wisdom:

Chicago Tribune columnist Steve Chapman is absolutely right that decriminalizing marijuana will save taxpayers boatloads of money and free up limited resources so that police can focus on preventing violent crime, as he pointed out in his recent column "A truth Obama won't dare tell" (Commentary, Feb. 3).

But it's absolutely wrong of Chapman to say, as he does in the column, that endorsing this common-sense policy change "would be considered political suicide" for a presidential candidate like U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

To the contrary, a CNN/Time Magazine poll taken in 2002 shows that 72 percent of Americans support marijuana decriminalization.

Obama's latest position opposing decriminalization will only win him favor with the mere 19 percent of Americans who, according to the poll, favor the continued arrest and jailing of otherwise law-abiding citizens who happen to use marijuana.

Supporting the criminalization of responsible adults is not only a senseless and cruel public policy, it is politically foolish. [Chicago Tribune]

Of course, polling data like this doesn’t necessarily reflect precisely how those same people will behave at the ballot box. And, as Pete Guither explains, any candidate endorsing reform faces the prospect of vicious mischaracterizations from their opposition.

All of this is true. Still, success in American politics has always depended on a candidate's ability to gracefully negotiate divisive issues. Just as an opponent's harsh attacks might chip away support for a controversial policy position, so may passionate words and sound reasoning reshape public opinion itself, turning polling data on its head and bringing legitimacy to ideas long relegated to the political fringes.

In that rare instant when the pre-written script is abandoned and the truth is permitted to speak for a moment on its own behalf, we have no frame of reference for the political viability of marijuana reform in presidential politics. The "foolishness" Tom describes is the mistake of recognizing common ground within the electorate and declining to indulge and nurture public values which run parallel to the candidate's own.

I suspect that the moment an already exciting and change-driven candidate takes the marijuana issue on the offensive and challenges Americans to envision a better policy, the popular preconceptions of our pundits and politicians will be disproved. If I am correct, then the biggest obstacle facing any politician who'd like to reform our marijuana laws is nothing other than his/her own willingness to throw the first punch.