There was always something different about her, off the beaten path.
From being among the small minority in Congress seeking to impeach Dick Cheney, to voting against a resolution lauding Christmas at the expense of other religious holy days (Eid or Hanukkah), Congresswoman Yvette Clarke stood out from the crowd.
Even when observed up close, she seems off-the-template, laid back and quizzical, as if she's playing in a newly learned game.
So in a way, it was no surprise to see all those references to her smoking cigarettes in the halls of Congress (though, in a bow to non-smoking rules, it's apparently been done in discreet places).
In a politico.com blog on a completely unrelated topic, the writer describe encountering Clarke as follows: "Clarke, caught outside the Longworth Building stealing a smoke . . . "
Hey, when you're as young as she is (43, by our calculation), maybe smoking doesn't pose quite the risk it does in later years.
Still, it's striking that she does it, a reflection perhaps of the aloofness that Brooklyn community newspapers have sometimes disparaged as incompetence, as when they knocked her for introducing few bills in Congress or suggesting that she is not eloquent.
One of the few D.C. big names that comes to mind holding a cigarette (and even then in the early 1960s it was puffed in private) is John F. Kennedy.
Hey, maybe this means bigger things are in store for the Representative from Flatbush!
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