It's No Party of the People

It's No Party of the People

Unlike Presidents Carter and Clinton, President Obama has not even tried to check the special interests that now dominate his party. There is no better example than ObamaCare, in particular the deal the president cut with the pharmaceutical lobby. Democrats had railed for years about how the drug manufacturers bent the 2002 Medicare prescription drug program toward their own ends, by using their clout to keep the government from negotiating lower drug prices and to maintain a ban on reimporting their drugs from Canada. On the stump, they promised to cut the drug makers down to size by allowing cheaper Canadian drugs to be reimported into the U.S.

But during the 2008 campaign, the pharmaceutical industry contributed some $8 million to Democratic candidates, nearly twice what it had donated to them in 2004, and gave more than $1 million to Mr. Obama alone. In 2009 it spent almost $200 million to lobby Congress and the White House for a special carve-out on the health-care bill. It worked: The legislation did not lift the reimportation ban, and Democrats nowadays no longer talk about it.