One upside to the Obama win is he will be much more agreeable to this than Romney. You can tell deep down inside Obama is totally fine with marijuana, and Romney is deeply against it. I doubt Obama will want his legacy to involve harsh crack downs on the first state to legalize marijuana. We'll have to see just how much control he can exert over the DEA.
I hope you're right, but I suspect you are giving Obama far too much credit. Regardless of what his personal attitudes may be, his capacity for hypocrisy has been amply demonstrated. (Case in point: his signing statement attached to the NDAA regarding his "opposition" to its provisions for detaining American citizens without due process vis-a-vis "Obama's" Justice Department's assiduous defense of those same provisions in federal court).
So if it really comes down to it, which do you think Obama would choose over the other:
(A) indulging an (alleged) personal preference - in this case, by not harassing pot-smokers in Colorado
OR
(B) refusing to allow the states to get away with flouting federal authority
My money is on B. And Obama will probably not have a whole lot of leeway, in any case. I don't think many people - even libertarians - really realize just how powerful the special interests *within* the government itself are. The POTUS, in many ways (and especially in matters such as these), is largely a figurehead. IOW: it's not really up to Obama.
The federal beast has no single head or master, and what Colorado has done is nullification, pure and simple. This is not to be tolerated, regardless of what private behaviors Obama is personally "totally fine" with.
The only thing that really matters here is how the DEA and other "stakeholding" power-centers in the FedGov decide to handle this issue. There are a number of possible strategies they could pursue, depending on how clever they can manage to be. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out.
