The American Spectator

“A man running for the Presidency must talk up, way up there.”

He also has to tell the truth.

The fact that Illinois Senator Barack Obama doesn’t grasp the first point, made by John F. Kennedy to his friend Theodore H. White at the close of White’s classic The Making of the President 1960, and simply ignores the second, is providing those of us here in Pennsylvania a startling look at two repeated behavioral patterns of a man who would be president.

1. A PATTERN OF DELIBERATELY NOT TELLING THE TRUTH:

As I write, Obama is running ads here in Pennsylvania in which he says:

“I’m Barack Obama. I don’t take money from oil companies or Washington lobbyists…”

Uh-huh. Says the Annenberg Political Fact Check:

“Obama has accepted more than $213,000 from individuals who work for companies in the oil and gas industry and their spouses.”

“Two of Obama’s bundlers are top executives at oil companies and are listed on his Web site as raising between $50,000 and $100,000 for the presidential hopeful.”

If you follow the link here to Oil Change International, a site that tracks contributions from the oil industry to politicians, you can even discover the Obama contributors by oil company name, title and precise individual amounts. Hint: do the names Exxon-Mobile, BP and Hess ring a bell?

Then there’s the business of attacking those big, bad pharmaceutical companies, from whom Obama doesn’t take money either:

A quick trip to OpenSecrets.org shows that Obama outstripped all candidates of both parties in the category of financial contributions from “Pharmaceuticals and Health Products,” racking up an impressive $528,765 in contributions.

If that’s not enough, check in with the folks over at Investor’s Business Daily and up pop these two gems:

“The Washington Times reports that while Sen. Obama has said he won’t accept money from the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers Association (PhRMA), he has accepted “tens of thousands” from partners at Covington & Burling LLP, which was paid nearly a half-million dollars to lobby for PhRMA last year.”

And: