About a week ago, the New York Post published a portfolio of photographs of Barack Obama that had been taken on the campus of Occidental College in 1980. According to the paper, the photographer, a university friend, had kept them in a safe-deposit box until after the election, “to make sure they wouldn’t fall into the wrong hands and be used for political purposes”.

What made them incriminating? Were they taken at a cocaine party sponsored by the campus Young Communists’ League? No – the scoop was that one of the photos showed Mr Obama smoking a cigarette. And that, in turn, has reignited, if you will pardon the expression, controversy over the first cigarette-smoking president since Lyndon Johnson. The attention paid to Mr Obama’s relationship with cigarettes is evidence of a pathology – and not on the part of the president-elect.