Obama's Chicago politics: Thuggery, not civility

◼ Obama talks a good game on transparency and openness, but he's ready to flout the law by avoiding AVS and to break his high-minded campaign promises. - Michael Barone/Washington Examiner

...In the 2008 campaign cycle, he promised to take public financing for the general election. He broke that promise when it became apparent he could raise far more money on his own.

During much of this cycle, he's been criticizing Republican super-PACs as a perversion of the political process. But when he saw that Republicans might be able to raise as much money as Democrats, he broke that promise too and authorized Cabinet members to appear at fundraisers for the super-PAC headed by his former deputy press secretary.

Democrats outraised Republicans in 2004 and 2008. Evidently Obama considers it grossly unfair that they might not do so this year. That's not how things work in Chicago.

The "campaigner in chief," as the Washington Post's Dana Milbank dubbed him yesterday, also has a nasty habit of denouncing Republican and conservative contributors by name. He's followed lefty bloggers in trying to demonize the Koch brothers.

This, coupled with a propensity to make jokes about siccing the Internal Revenue Service on people, looks like an attempt to chill opposition political speech. Especially when there are reports that Tea Party organizations are getting hassled by the IRS.

Obama also indulges often in reckless political rhetoric. He likes to say Republicans want no regulations at all on financial institutions and businesses.

It would be more politically astute, I think, and would certainly look less thuggish to draw intellectually defensible distinctions between his own regulatory policies and those of the opposition. Attacks like this sound like debates late at night in the dorm.

"If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun," Obama said during the 2008 cycle. That sounds like something you might hear from a community organizer. Or a Chicago pol....