Lynn Sweet today turns in a must-read piece detailing President Obama’s broken promise to make negotiations on health care transparent. Writes Lynn:

When candidate Barack Obama was criss-crossing the country in his two year presidential campaign, a standard part of his stump speech — lines that always won him applause — had to do with his promise to negotiate health care reform in public, on C-SPAN, for all to see. As the wrangling over health overhaul legislation heads into its final stretch, it’s clear that was a promise President Obama did not keep. The deal making remained behind closed doors.

There’s no arguing that this is among President Obama’s most blatant broken promises. He did not hedge his commitment on the campaign trail – it was a riff he repeated at virtually every campaign stop. As Lynn writes:

Obama said variations of that at scores of stops. At a Jan. 31, 2008, debate in Los Angeles, he said he would deal in the open, “not negotiating behind closed doors, but bringing all parties ogether, and broadcasting those negotiations on C-SPAN so that the American people can see what the choices are, because part of what we have to do is enlist the American people in this process.”

To explain the switch, Lynn presumes that the Obama team simply calculated that passing a bill negotiated in secrecy was better than not passing a bill negotiated publicly. But this is far from the first process-oriented promise that the Obama Team has unapologetically dropped: For example, he’s also nominated lobbyists to senior Administration spots, failed to wait 72-hours to sign bills, and hedged on his commitments to limit signing statements and government secrecy.

In truth, I suspect that the Obama Team never intended to keep his good-government promises – that they were useful rhetorical tools on the campaign trail, but not serious governing priorities. And, so far, they seem right — the public-backlash has been minimal. But these sort of flip-flops nevertheless hurt the President’s credibility, and will make voters more skeptical of his promises when he seeks re-election in 2012.