Obama Flip Flops On Super PAC's

Talking Sides:

Two years ago President Barack Obama railed against a certain type of political action committee known as super PAC's as a "threat to our democracy". Today his reelection campaign confirmed that both administration and campaign officials will fundraise for Priorities USA Action, a super PAC backing the president.

In October of 2010, shortly before the shellacking his fellow Democrats took in the mid-term elections, Mr. Obama spoke at a rally in Philadelphia. He attacked these groups which the Supreme Court ruled could raise unlimited sums from corporations, unions and other groups, as well as individuals. He implied they all had sinister motives and told outright lies about foreign entities being involved in swaying US elections.

"You don’t know," he said. “It could be the oil industry, it could be the insurance industry, it could even be foreign-owned corporations. You don’t know because they don’t have to disclose. Now that’s not just a threat to Democrats, that’s a threat to our democracy."

During the same time, the Democratic National Committee produced an advertisement accusing the US Chamber of Commerce of using secret foreign funds to influence US elections; actions which would have violated existing law. When the president’s senior adviser David Axelrod was asked by CBS's Bob Sheiffer if he had any evidence that the claim was true his reply, "Well, do you have any evidence that it's not, Bob?" exposed the allegations as the desperate lies they were.

Evidently these threats to our democracy don't seem so threatening to our Campaigner-in-Chief anymore. Obama Campaign Manager Jim Messina sent out an e-mail to supporters saying that, "The campaign has decided to do what we can, consistent with the law, to support Priorities USA in its effort to counter the weight of the GOP super PACs." Mr. Messina added, "We will do so only in the knowledge and with the expectation that all of its donations will be fully disclosed as required by law to the Federal Election Commission."

Now that Obama & Company have acknowledged that super PAC's are legitimate groups of Americans legally participating in the political process subject to reasonable oversight, will he apologize for the wild and baseless accusations he and his cronies made against them when it suited his political purposes to do so? Somehow I doubt it.