Common Cause for years has seemed like a one-trick (if that) pony, issuing press releases and other pontifications calling for campaign finance reform. You would thus expect it to be outraged at Obama’s recent flip-flop, supporting public financing up to the point it was no longer in his interest to do so. (If I were being snide, I would say that’s how liberals often treat principles they claim to support.)
Or at least as outraged as those major media editorial boards that have supported Obama the Reformer:
… Obama’s announcement Thursday that he would become the first candidate to opt out of the public financing program for the general election was a big deal for some of the nation’s most influential newspaper editorial boards, which have long been ardent champions of campaign finance reform and which had thought they’d found a kindred spirit on the issue.
Friday morning, scathing editorials in many top broadsheets characterized Obama’s move as a self-interested flip-flop, dismissed his efforts to cast it as a principled stand and charged that Obama wasn’t living up to the reformer image around which he has crafted his political identity.
If you expected similar levels of disapproval from Common Cause, however, you’d be sadly disappointed. After mustering up what outrage it oculd master, here’s all Common Cause could say:
But Sen. Obama did say at one point that he would opt into the system if his opponent did the same, and for that he gets a demerit.
A demerit! Boy, I bet it’ll take the Obama campaign weeks to get over that powerful put-down.
Common Cause’s action, or lack thereof, strikes me as analogous to the NAACP assigning Obama “a demerit” if he reversed course on his long-standing opposition to lynching.
