President Barack Obama has said he ran for office because he believed “so strongly that the voices of ordinary Americans were being drowned out by the clamor of a privileged few in Washington.”
Obama’s popularity among the Democratic base in ’08 and ’12 was due in large part to his seemingly sincere promises to fix a corrupt political system. In fact, Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg argues persuasively that running on a platform to fundamentally reform money in politics so government works for the middle class is also the Democrats best hope for electoral success in 2016.
Obama even famously blasted the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision at his 2010 State of the Union address with members of the court looking on, saying “I don’t think American elections should be bankrolled by America’s most powerful interests, or worse, by foreign entities.”
But any politician can draw applause lines deriding special interests. Even Ted Cruz, a fanatic supporter of eliminating all limits on the amount of money in elections, frequently calls out our “government of the lobbyists, by the lobbyists, and for the lobbyists.”
Elected leaders should be measured on what they do, not just what they say.