How many commitments does he have to break?

The
LA times
has exposed a nice little bit of hypocrisy from Barack
Obama’s campaign. His campaign is now directly soliciting
high-six-figure checks from unions:

In an example of the campaign’s late-innings effort, a very
senior Obama campaign official called the political director of one
of the largest labor unions about two weeks ago and asked for a
$500,000 contribution on top of a similar amount that had been
committed just a few weeks before, according to the union
official.

The campaign, further more, refuses to deny whether Obama is
doing it directly:

A spokesman for the campaign, Hari Sevugan, declined to say
whether Obama himself had become involved in these fundraising
efforts or to confirm any details of work done by others from the
campaign.

Now, my problem here isn’t that he is doing it. It is the
hypocrisy of attacking it and then doing and claiming that he is
clean. This “say Mister Clean, do Mr. Washington” pattern is
the pattern of his campaign. Read on for
details.

First he says that he will take public financing. Then he
doesn’t. His argument is that he gets most of his money from small
donors. It’s not true, as noted by Open
Secrets
.

In the primary, he attacked outside groups for attacking him,
but thought it was fine that they attacked Obama. He also invoked
Republican outside groups — and there are none this year — when
he dropped out of public financing. At the same time, AFL-CIO is
dropping $54m, and just last week the
the Obama campaign started sending signals
to outside groups
that they should turn it on.

Indeed, as a comical exercise, just
google “obama outside groups”
. Here’s what you get:

The only “Change I Can Believe In” there is the changing on the
dime for his own political advantage.

Categories: Syndicated

Soren Dayton

Soren Dayton is an advocacy professional in Washington, DC who has worked in policy, politics, and in human rights, including in India. Soren grew up in Chicago.