Marathon Pundit: More on the Obama public financing flip flop

In this morning's National Review Online, Stephen Spruiell throws some cold water on Barack Obama's explanation on his flip flop regarding accepting public financing during the general election campaign.

Obama now says he has no choice but to outspend McCain by tens of millions because "we've already seen" that John McCain is "not going to stop" independent-advocacy groups from raising and spending their own money on political speech. Meanwhile, the only outside group we've seen running attack ads is MoveOn.org, whose cloying "Hands off my baby" ad recycles the 100-years smear against McCain.

Independent advocacy groups are still free to spend their own money to attack or defend a candidate, and that's why "the public financing of presidential elections as it exists today is broken," Obama says. An Obama spokesman told reporters Thursday that, as president, Obama would push to fix the system by 2012. The system won’t be fixed, you see, until paid political speech is restricted to the candidates themselves and financed by your tax dollars.

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Obama, he never tires of telling us, doesn’t accept contributions from registered lobbyists. But he never talks about the 14 registered lobbyists working as bundlers for his campaign, each of whom will help him by raising tens of thousands of dollars in smaller donations. Of course, obfuscation through the careful omission of facts is an art that all politicians master.