Over at Reason Magazine, a piece entitled Obama and the L-Word.

Here’s how predictable the president’s slippery relationship with the truth has become: Hours before the State of the Union address, Washington Examiner reporter Timothy P. Carney posted a “pre-emptive fact check” that, among other things, prebutted any presidential claim to have “stopped the revolving door between government and corporate lobbying.” As it happened, that night Barack Obama made an even bolder (read: less truthful) claim: that “we’ve excluded lobbyists from policymaking jobs.”

Matt Welch points out an example of why this was so obviously wrong:

In fact, more than 40 former lobbyists work in the administration, including such policy makers as Deputy Defense Secretary William J. Lynn (who was lobbying for Raytheon as recently as 2008), Office of the First Lady Director of Policy and Projects Jocelyn Frye (National Partnership for Women and Families), White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Cecilia Muñoz (National Council of La Raza), and Treasury Secretary Chief of Staff Mark Patterson (Goldman Sachs).

Fiddlesticks. Well, he means well, so what’s a lobbyist for good causes and maybe a few humongous banks and maybe a defense contractor or two?

This reminded me of another recent story, though:

Emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act show that the Obama Department of Energy is using the American Wind Energy Association (AWEA) — the lobbying arm of “Big Wind” in the U.S. — to coordinate political responses with two strongly ideological activist groups: the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), and the George Soros funded Center for American Progress (CAP).

But what’s a little white lie for a good cause, right?

The difference between these two most recent Democratic presidents, substantial to begin with (especially in the crucial area of economic policy), may come into sharper relief in 2010. Clinton’s reptilian relationship with the truth, suffused as it always has been with a catch-me-if-you-can sense of personal preservation, actually turned out to have some uses for the nation when he changed course after the 1994 Republican revolution and began co-opting some of the limited-government policies proposed by his opponents. It’s easier for a chameleon to change his spots.

Obama’s dishonesty, by contrast, seems to spring from a different place. As a man who has spent most of his career wowing people with his words and very little of it converting those words into deeds, he has an activist’s gap between rhetoric and reality and a radio broadcaster’s promiscuous carelessness with cutting rhetorical corners. Sure, it’s not technically true that the administration’s day-one lobbying reforms served “to get rid of the influence of…special interests,” as he claimed in a January radio address (to the contrary: federal lobbying in 2009 set an all-time record), but it’s easy to imagine that the president feels his combination of tighter employment restrictions for ex-lobbyists and stricter disclosure requirements for current ones is, in the context of the Manichean fight between “the people” and “special interests,” good enough for government work. The perfect shouldn’t be the enemy of the good, and the critics who complain are just opportunistic literalists grasping for any club to beat back the march of progress. No need to give them an inch.

So no foul, since Obama’s by definition the good guy.

But there’s a less charitable explanation too. During the president’s nonstop gabfests before, during, and after the State of the Union speech, he kept repeating the fiction that the medical industry’s “special interests” were significantly to blame for scotching his health care legislation. In fact, the administration and Congress negotiated with those interests every step of the way, receiving crucial buy-in and millions in campaign contributions. Pro-reform lobbyists outspent anti-reform lobbyists on advertising by a factor of 5 to 1. There’s a three-letter word for blaming the defeat of his bill on health care lobbyists, and it rhymes with pie.

That’s not very nice.

And yet it smacks of something worse still. When a politician cannot fathom opposition to his policies except as the manifestation of wicked manipulation by bad guys, remediable only by more thorough “explanations” from the good guys, it indicates an unseemly paternalism. And if he cannot take the hint that Bush-Obama bailout-and-spend economics are deeply and increasingly unpopular, that indicates something immovable about his core economic ideology. With those two factors as backdrop, it’s hard to say which would be worse: if the president didn’t really believe what he said, or if he did.

Indeed. I’m pining for the good old days of Billy-Jeff Clinton. When he lied, all was right with the world, because you knew deep down that no matter what his lips said, he wouldn’t do anything really, really crazy. When this one tells you he’s going to do something crazy, believe him. Don’t believe a word of his justification, but believe every word of his intent.