Obama Makes Pitch as Ethical Outsider

[illinoisprogressive]

P
oliticians for decades have struggled to craft effective policies on health care and energy, and simply electing a Democrat to the White House will not solve the problem, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama told a crowd of several hundred at a State House rally yesterday.

"It's not enough to change the political party in the White House," Obama said. "We need to change how politics are done and open it up to the American people."

Obama, a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois, said one of the major differences between himself and the other candidates is his ability to take on special interest groups and lobbyists and to do so in a bipartisan fashion.

"I have a track record of passing ethics reform at every level of government that I worked for," Obama said.

Throughout his campaign, Obama has stressed his commitment to government reform. In Secretary of State Bill Gardner's office yesterday, moments after he officially filed as a candidate for the New Hampshire primary, Obama told reporters that the frustration of the American people with the government comes partially from the fact that "we still haven't changed how businesses is done in Washington."

"We still have a disproportionate influence of lobbyists, PACs and special interests that still dictate a lot of the agenda in Washington," Obama said. "We can't essentially do business the same way and expect there will be a significant difference in outlooks on things like health care, energy or foreign policy."

Obama, who, along with Sen. John Edwards, has refused to take campaign contributions from lobbyists or political action committees, touted his experience combating special interests in his eight years in the Illinois legislature and his one term in the U.S. Senate. "I have the strongest track record of any candidate in this race of consistently working to open government and make it more accountable to the American people," he said.

In the U.S. Senate, Obama co-sponsored legislation with Democratic Sen. Russell Feingold that would ban lobbyists from giving gifts or free travel to legislators, prohibit congressional employees from lobbying within two years of leaving office, place restrictions on legislators taking corporate flights, and require the disclosure of campaign contributions that lobbyists collect from donors. That bill was not passed, but many of those provisions were incorporated into a compromise bill that became law last month.

Although it is too early to see how significant the bill's impact will be, Gary Bass, executive director of the nonprofit government accountability research and advocacy group OMB Watch, said lobbyists already are consulting with their attorneys to figure out what behaviors are legal.

"There's been a lot more disclosure of earmarks, more disclosure of lobbying, more rules about what you can and can't do about gifts and travel," Bass said.

Bass said that Obama led the team that worked on government reform since before the Democrats took control of Congress and that his work provided the framework for the compromise bill. "It demonstrated two things about Obama: One, he thought through a decent framework, and two, he was willing to work with a number of players to get things done," Bass said.


http://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071023/FRONTPAGE/710230339