Obama’s defense of super PAC reversal: The ends justify the means

posted at 1:03 pm on February 15, 2012 by Howard Portnoy

It is the rare elected official that is not guilty of flip-flopping at one time or another in his career. What makes Barack Obama such a special case when it comes to reversing positions is the high bar he set for himself earlier in his career in government.

Here he is in a video from 2005, speaking out on the floor of the U.S. Senate, lecturing his Republican colleagues on the twin evils of filibustering and allowing monied special interests to function as players in the political process:

I understand that Republicans are getting a lot of pressure to do this [resort to the nuclear option] from factions outside the chamber. But we need to rise above an “ends justify the means” mentality because we’re here to answer to the people—all of the people—not just the ones wearing our party label. [Emphasis added]

He was even more adamantly self-righteous in his 2010 State of the Union address, when he took aim at the Supreme Court for lifting the ceiling on the amount of money that corporations and unions can spend on political campaigns:

Last week, the Supreme Court reversed a century of law to open the floodgates for special interests—including foreign companies—to spend without limit in our elections. Well, I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, and worse, by foreign entities. They should be decided by the American people, and that’s why I’m urging Democrats and Republicans to pass a bill that helps to right this wrong.

That bill was never passed. But last week the president found another way of leveling the playing field. He announced that he would be accepting donations from super PACs, effectively selling shares of putative second term to the highest bidders.

And what was the reason he gave for this about-face? It’s not that he suddenly likes the idea of dirty money. Rather, as he explained in an interview with WBTV, the CBS affiliate in Charlotte, North Carolina:

We’ve got some of these [Republican] super PACs that have pledged to spend up to half a billion dollars to try to buy this election. And what I’ve said consistently is, we’re not going to just unilaterally disarm.

Barack H. Obama: Who knew his middle initial stood for hypocrite?

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