Those are words spoken by Barack Obama back when he was first becoming a politician. They remind me of a friend of mine who is a car salesman. His philosophy is, "If you think you got a good deal, you did."
Notice that neither statement talks about the morality of these positions. Or whether, in an objective sense, the behavior is correct. Instead, both statements are set outside a world where morality has anything to do with behavior.
In my friend's case, the goal is simple: he sells a car for the highest price he can get the buyer to agree to. Perhaps he leaves out information that would cause the buyer to want a lower price or maybe he adds something that causes the car to appear to be a better buy. For my friend, if the buyer thinks he got a good deal, that's good enough, whether it was actually the best deal possible or not.
In Obama's case, it meant ensuring that every competitor was knocked out of the race if there was any way of doing so. He had each Democrat on the ballot disqualified, using the most nitpicky rules to do so. He had signatures bumped because a married woman had used her maiden hame. Or someone printed their information, as opposed to signing. Maybe there was a misspelling.
Were these tactics illegal? Absolutely not. As one Obama supporter said, "The rules are there for a reason."
Now, we fast forward a few years and Barack Obama is in a tight election for president of the United States. But many of his supporters are unhappy that Republicans might also think "the rules are there for a reason." Now there are calls to vote early because it gives more time to other voters on Election Day, since evil, nasty Republicans will be checking to make sure every name is spelled right, every street address is correct.
So, why was it permissible to use the rules to prevent Obama's competitors from challenging him, but mean and (well, we can't call it cheating but it's not nice!) sneaky to use the rules to prevent Obama votes in the general election?
I think this quote from a few years ago by a man now seeking the presidency provides a valuable argument against those complainers who will invariably whinge about checking for voter fraud:
"To my mind, we were just abiding by the rules that had been set up," the senator is quoted as saying in the Tribune. "My conclusion was that if you couldn't run a successful petition drive, then that raised questions in terms of how effective a representative you were going to be."
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