Tucked away in Fred Hyatt’s column today in the Washington Post about President Obama not living up to his promise to tell Americans “what you need to hear, not what you want to hear,” is this revealing nugget:

And as the incumbent has discovered, irresponsible campaign promises don’t magically fade upon election. There’s no guarantee that Obama would have behaved differently as president had he not promised during the campaign never to raise taxes on the middle class or laced into John McCain’s sensible proposal to tax employer-provided health care. But there’s no doubt that both campaign stances limited his freedom in office.

Ah. Those darn campaign promises, limiting elected officials’ freedom in office! [At that moment, thousands of readers cried aloud in unison, ‘hey, what about limiting my freedom?’]

I suppose this comes down to whether you believe the ideal outcome for our democratic republic is to put elected officials in power with maximum range of options, or whether the whole point of the campaign is to put a choice, often a stark choice, before the people and let them decide, and for the elected officials to enact that choice.

I’m reminded of Matt Bai’s The Argument, in a section where he discusses the most influential political movements of the 20th Century:

While all of their proponents labored to make them as universal and as palatable to voters as possible, none of these arguments grew originally from a desire to win elections, nor were they designed to be immediately acceptable to the broadest swath of voters. FDR’s vision inspired generations of free marketers to detest everything he stood for, even as they reached unimagined prosperity. Johnson and Kennedy turned the entire American South away from the Democratic cause. Reagen’s thesis cleaved the country, bringing on twenty years of intense polarization. Each of these arguments, in fact, infuriated large numbers of reasonable and influential Americans – but that was precisely what made them compelling and important. That was the cost of forcing people to choose between one governing path and another, and in such choices lay the fate of the republic.

We on the Right have a particular reason to want to get explicit promises from those who seek to rule us, having seen a president elected who pledged, “Read my lips, no new taxes,” enact tax hikes and seen the last three Democratic presidents insist that they’re moderates on the stump and then govern much more liberally than promised. Very, very rarely does a president (or any lawmaker, really) turn out to be more devoted to the cause of limited government and limited spending than they claimed to be on the campaign trail.

And as the guy who keeps pointing out that all statements from Barack Obama come with an expiration date, I would argue that the problem with Obama is not that he feels too constricted and bound by all of those grandiose promises from 2007 and 2008.