President for tax hikes after opposing them

Should President Obama decide to leave his leftover "Hope" and "Change" signs in storage for campaign 2012, we've got a fresh slogan that sums up his re-election bid: Do as I say, not as I said.

The president was in Cannon Falls, Minn., and Decorah, Iowa, on Monday, kicking off a three-day bus tour through the Midwest. In both towns, Mr. Obama ridiculed Republican presidential candidates' blanket opposition to raising taxes during a deepening recession as part of any plan to reduce future budget deficits.

"That's just not common sense," Mr. Obama said. "I make no apologies for being reasonable."

Nor will Mr. Obama apologize for breaking a central 2008 campaign promise.

One might think, given the president's insistence that taxes be raised further, that he won election in 2008 on a promise of dozens of tax hikes on everything from cigarettes to health insurance policies to tanning salons. One also struggles to remember his vow to run up the biggest budget deficits in the history of the world, putting the country on the same fiscal trajectory as the failed social-welfare states of Europe, so he could blame Republicans for "unreasonably" refusing to raise taxes to pay the bills run up by the Obama-Pelosi Democrats.

In fact, then-Sen. Obama, as hard is may be to believe today, campaigned as a fiscal conservative. He voted against increasing the country's debt ceiling and relentlessly criticized Republicans for a string of nine-figure budget deficits in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. And he vowed to never raise taxes on any American who earns less than $250,000 per year -- by a single dime, ever. He could have been a charter member of the tea party.

Those promises were shattered less than 60 days after he took office. Up went the federal cigarette tax, which disproportionately hits the middle and lower classes. Next came an entirely debt-funded, $1 trillion Keynesian stimulus (promising "shovel ready" jobs -- a commodity the president now laughingly admits never existed.) And the piece de resistance, ObamaCare, which built an innovation-stifling, cost-boosting regulatory structure for American medicine while creating or raising 20 separate taxes, nearly half of which already have taken effect, according to Americans for Tax Reform.

Now Mr. Obama disparages Republicans for making and keeping the same kinds of promises he made in 2008 -- and immediately broke. And he believes this allows him to claim the high ground? The only way to get there is to keep your word. Mr. Obama will have to forgive voters if they're more inclined to believe the Republican nominee's promises of restraint come 2012.