Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.
But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.
I can't help but wonder if all these people are still squarely in the 4 Obama camp.
Would love to hear from them.
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