Four years after President Barack Obama promised to change the culture of Washington, it’s hard to imagine how his ethics, transparency and campaign finance pledges could have backfired more thoroughly.
Even before the president solicited unlimited corporate donations for his inauguration and announced he will reinvent his campaign operation as an unrestricted lobbying group, government watchdog groups were already fed up with Obama’s many reversals.
Grievances include his failure to follow through on pledges to overhaul the public financing system, to fill vacancies at the Federal Election Commission and to make his administration the most transparent in history. Not to mention his decision to embrace unrestricted super PACs after saying he would reject them.
From a public relations point of view, Obama would have drawn far less criticism had he promised — and done — nothing on the government watchdog front. Had he not pledged “the most sweeping ethics reform in history,” critics might have made little of his administration’s many concessions to pragmatism over principle.
As it is, Obama’s stated commitment to change, coupled with his tendency to put new rules in place and then retract them, has doubly galled progressive activists and drawn a steady stream of bad press. As one ethics advocate put it: “As any parent knows, you don’t take something away that you’ve already given.”
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