Barack Obama is preparing to renege on his pledge to accept public financing. But rather than be honest and say, “I changed my mind,” he is going to try to convince us that he really has a “parallel public financing.” What is that? Raising gobs of money from the internet. In normal-speak, this would be NOT be called public financing. But hey, the terms seems to have a fluid definition: in Hillary Clinton-speak, it means taking over $200,000 from oil and gas company employees.

Most conservatives favor the private funding of campaigns, which is what Obama is prepared to do. It is Democrats who have raged that such a system gives undue influence to fatcats and special interests (not labor unions, mind you: only interests they don’t like) who, although restrained by campaign donation limits, can still bundle large sums of money. Obama’s message: never mind all that.

But this is nothing new. He seems to have perfected the art of cloaking rank hypocrisy in high-minded rhetoric and hoping the media and public are too dim to catch on. For the man who favored strict handgun control but now seeks the pro-gun vote and who preaches racial unity but refuses to separate himself from his race-baiting mentor, this is really par for the course.