Obama: I was for deregulation before I was against it.

Last April, then candidate Obama gave an interview to Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday, that at the time had me guffawing, and now I simply shudder at the craven lack of principles guiding the candidate who became president.

Observe the following exchange:

WALLACE: Over the years, John McCain has broken with his party and risked his career on a number of issues — campaign finance, immigration reform, banning torture.
As a president, can you name a hot-button issue where you would be willing to buck the Democratic Party line and say, “You know what? Republicans have a better idea here?”

OBAMA: Well, I think there are a whole host of areas where Republicans in some cases may have a better idea.

WALLACE: Such as?

OBAMA: Well, on issues of regulation. I think that back in the ’60s and ’70s a lot of the way we regulated industry was top-down command and control, we’re going to tell businesses exactly how to do things.

And you know, I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, “You know what? If you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives, for businesses — let them figure out how they’re going to, for example, reduce pollution,” and a cap and trade system, for example is a smarter way of doing it, controlling pollution, than dictating every single rule that a company has to abide by, which creates a lot of bureaucracy and red tape and oftentimes is less efficient.”
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At the time, I laughed out loud at the thought of the Republicans just waiting at home biding their time waiting to a candidate to reach out to them on the key issue of…regulation.

Contrast his statements from a year ago to this Bloomberg article from yesterday:

Obama to Discuss Regulation Plan, Pay With Bankers (Update1)
By Roger Runningen
March 26 (Bloomberg) — President Barack Obama plans to discuss the administration’s proposals for new regulations on financial institutions when he meets with the chief executives of the nation’s biggest banks tomorrow, his spokesman said.

Obama also likely will “get into compensation and bonuses and excesses like that and the notion that we have to change the culture of the way Wall Street works,” press secretary Robert Gibbs said.

The president, who has expressed anger over bonuses paid by some institutions that have gotten taxpayer assistance, “isn’t going to say one thing out here and a different thing in there,” Gibbs said.

Sure, Bobby, because he’s never done that before.
But they’re just words, right?

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