Campaign advisers to President Obama revealed last weekend that they are looking for a new campaign slogan to replace the much-vaunted “Change We Can Believe In” of 2008.
He’s apparently downgrading the bromides that helped sweep him into office. “Obama promotes modest American dream,” reported the Associated Press on Tuesday. “He’s focused less on a lofty vision for overcoming divisions and remaking Washington, and more on the most basic building blocks of middle-class economic security: a job, a house, a college education for the kids, health care, money for retirement.”
Leave aside for the time being whether the President’s policies have actually advanced those “building blocks.” What happened to Hope and Change?
Simply, the President happened. On his long list of broken campaign promises, changing the “culture of Washington” is perhaps the most conspicuously unaccomplished. In fact the president seems to have bought into that culture hook, line and sinker.
If big government encourages cronyism, then the president’s policies were destined to perpetuate that culture. There have been giveaways to “green energy,” policies aimed at advancing Big Labor’s fiscal priorities, and the installation of major campaign donors in powerful federal offices. Two recent revelations, however, have crystallized the degree to which the president has not only failed to reform Washington insiderism, but helped preserve the status quo where he feels it is in his political interests.
How has the White House defended cabinet officials’ decisions to headline fundraisers for pro-Obama super PACs? In part by complaining that it is not on a “level playing field” with respect to campaign spending. Officials have pointed to Republican presidential candidates who benefit from super PAC support.
But the comparison is erroneous. Fundraising for third-party groups is inherently different for an incumbent than it is for a challenger. The presence of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, for instance, at a fundraiser could create perverse incentives for the companies and organizations that Sebelius’s agency is charged with regulating.
Sen. Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.) noted as much in a letter to the president last week.
“The potential for health care stakeholders to perceive a compulsion to financially participate in these activities, to possibly avert subsequent adverse regulatory decisions, is self evident,” Enzi explained.
Republican challengers can’t use the implicit threat of a regulatory backlash – or the promise of regulatory favoritism – to compel support from companies or groups looking to influence the political process.
Of course currying favor with one’s own regulators is business as usual in Washington. But that’s a business that then-Sen. Obama pledged not just to avoid, but to root out and eliminate.
Meanwhile, a Tuesday report from The Heritage Foundation’s investigative reporting unit revealed that federal grants spiked while Congress was considering the president’s top three legislative priorities early in his administration: Obamacare, Cap and Trade, and Dodd-Frank. What’s more, a host of vulnerable House Democrats received large sums of federal money right around the House’s votes on those bills.
The possibility that the administration may have “bought” House votes using grant money fits with its track record of greasing the wheels in Washington with payoffs to major constituencies. Even congressional vote-buying is a documented tactic – Sens. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) and Mary Landrieu (D-La.) only voted for Obamacare after the administration promised their states a total of $145 million in additional Medicaid payments.
Three years into the Obama presidency, the President hasn’t done a thing to reform DC’s legislative sausage factory. If anything, the back-room deal-making and quid pro quos that have come to define the nation’s capital are more prevalent and important than ever before. Change, indeed.
