Candidate flip, president flop

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http://www.salon.com/news/politics/barack_obama/index.html?story=/opinion/feature/2009/12/18/candidate_promises


BY DAVID SIROTA

Every now and then, an insider inadvertently exposes the hideous rationalizations that run the American political grotesquerie. The best known of these statements are memorialized on TV as "gaffes." But the ones that never become famous tend to reveal the ugliest assumptions of all.

Case in point is the comment the pharmaceutical industry recently let fly in the Washington Post. The newspaper this week examined how the Obama administration crushed legislation that would have allowed Americans to purchase lower-priced FDA-approved medicines from abroad -- legislation that President Obama promised to support as a presidential candidate; legislation that would have reduced drug profiteering and saved the government and consumers $100 billion.

"It's about being a candidate as opposed to being president," said the drug industry's top lobbyist in defense of Obama's flip-flop.

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Second, an obvious but taboo truth: There are almost no substantive reasons candidates cannot champion their election-year promises once in office. These pledges are made through deliberative processes. Candidates shouldn't make them if they're not serious about follow-through -- and it's not unreasonable to ask officeholders to at least try to honor the campaign commitments that informed voters' electoral decisions. That's especially true on something like drug importation, whose opposition is about enlarging profits, not, as Obama aides argue, about protecting consumer safety.

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But fibbing for the public good is different than breaking promises for private gain. In the latter cases, "candidate vs. president" apologias are non sequiturs. They justify nothing -- and they clearly do not rationalize an importation U-turn by Obama designed only to protect a drug cartel.

That kind of power-coddling reversal insults voters, and absolving such an insult isn't savvy -- it betrays our nation's founding principles.

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