Today, we are told, the president will signal his support for using reconciliation to pass ObamaCare. The arguments against using this legislative approach have been well stated, including in a powerful Wall Street Journal editorial today. But an additional point must be made.

It seems like it was another era, but it was as recently as 2008 that Barack Obama — more than any figure I can recall — based his campaign on the aesthetics and romance of politics, on “hope and change,” and on a new, uplifting, transpartisan brand of politics. “’I will listen to you, especially when we disagree,” Obama said on the night of his election.

This victory was made possible only because he portrayed himself as “a figure uncorrupted and unco-opted by evil Washington,” as Harry Reid told Obama. David Axelrod believed the road to success was in Obama’s promise to be “a unifier and not a polarizer; someone nondogmatic and uncontaminated by the special-interest cesspool that Washington had become,” in the words of the book Game Change. Obama’s public appeal derived from his “rhetoric of change and unity, his freshness and sense of promise.”

“We have something special here,” Axelrod reportedly said. “I feel like I’ve been handed a porcelain baby.”

Perhaps. But that porcelain baby is in the process of being shattered into a thousand pieces. The “special-interest cesspool that Washington had become” has become worse since Obama stepped foot inside the Oval Office. Obama, himself, is the most polarizing first-year president in our lifetime. And he has contaminated himself and his party to a startling degree.

Pushing reconciliation to pass ObamaCare — and in the process, overturning the tradition and misusing the rules of the Senate to get his way — shows yet again that Obama’s campaign was built on cynical, misleading, and downright untrue claims. He simply could not have meant what he said, based on his conduct in office. Now, it’s true that his rhetoric was so soaring, and the bar was set so high, that no person could have met the expectations Obama created. But to have fallen this far so quickly is still hard to believe.

The public doesn’t like to be played for fools. Obama has done that. And he’s only compounding his problems by pushing for reconciliation. Mr. Obama has decided to take a massively unpopular piece of legislation and abuse his power to get his way. This is not what a figure uncorrupted and un-co-opted by evil Washington would do.

The unmasking of Barack Obama continues. It is not a pleasant thing to watch. And he and his party will pay a huge political price for what they are doing, perhaps unlike any we have seen.