Obama and the L-word: the president's habit of telling untruths.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the top - Barack Obama, lobbying

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."

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 Munoz (National Council of La Raza), and Treasury Secretary Chief of Staff Mark Patterson (Goldman Sachs).

When Carney confronted a White House spokeswoman with the falsehood, she conceded nothing. "As the President said," she wrote, "we have turned away lobbyists for many, many positions." Just not all of them.

As such defiance suggests, this was no isolated slip of the tongue. The president, who promised in both word and style to usher in a "new era" of Washington "responsibility," routinely says things that aren't true and supports initiatives that break campaign promises (see "Promises Worth Breaking," page 8).When called on it, he mostly keeps digging. And when obliged to explain why American voters are turning so sharply away from his party and his policies (see "Mass. Hysteria" page 20), Obama pins the blame not on his own deviations from verity but on his failure to "explain" things "more clearly to the American people."

Take the issue he has explained more than any other: health care. In the State of the Union address, Obama claimed that the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had estimated that "our approach" to health care reform "would bring down the deficit by as much as $1 trillion over the next two decades." This is, strictly speaking, not true. The Democrats' "approach" to health care reform includes a permanent change to the Medicare reimbursement rates for doctors, colloquially known as the "doc fix." The CBO estimated that the doc fix, when combined with the health care reform legislative package, actually "would increase the budget deficit in 2019 by $23 billion relative to...