Obama's double-talk: while the president talks sobriety, his policies take America on an economic bender.

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

HIGH-FLYING presidencies tend to reveal their base character in trivial moments. In March 2002, when the nation was still massively behind George W. Bush in the wake of the September IT attacks, he gave the first obvious signal that his administration would play cheap politics even in a time of grave global uncertainty by slapping a temporary new tariff on imported steel. If the world's fragile economy and the putatively bedrock principles of free trade could be sold out for a couple of percentage points in contested Rust Belt states, we shouldn't have been surprised to learn that the very "war on terror" would be subject to political manipulation, or that Bush's skin-deep economic philosophy could not be counted on in a crisis. The costs of what this move revealed became clear soon enough, and eventually Americans withdrew their benefit of the doubt.

Barack Obama's revelatory moment may have come in his first week as president. On his first day of work, he signed an executive order prohibiting lobbyists from holding high-ranking administration jobs, thereby fulfilling a campaign promise to "close the revolving door" between K Street and government via "the most sweeping ethics reform in history." Two days later, the president granted a "waiver" from the new rules to install Raytheon lobbyist William Lynn as the No. 2 man in the Pentagon.

As offenses go, the move was trivial. But as a signal of a governing pathology, it established a pattern that Obama has repeated serially since being sworn into office: reiterate a high-sounding promise from the campaign, undermine said promise with a concrete act of governance to the contrary, then claim with a straight face that the campaign promise has been and will continue to be fulfilled.

So candidate Obama promised to usher in the "most transparent administration in history,' in part by making sure the American people were allowed to read each proposed nonemergency law for at least five days before the president signs it. Yet in his first month, President Obama signed three laws from the liberal wish list--the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), the Lily Ledbetter Fair Play Act, and the $787 billion "stimulus" package--in less than five days. Explained the White House: "We will be implementing this policy in full soon.... Currently we are working through implementation procedures."

The SCHIP law, which was paid for in part by a cigarette tax hike of 6I cents a pack, also put the lie...