Senator Barack Obama rests his entire campaign upon the claim that he is a “post-partisan” candidate who trumpets the slogan “change we can believe in.”

But the more we learn about Barack Obama, the more he exposes himself as the same old, run-of-the-mill, contriving politician. His soaring rhetoric understandably inspires audiences and leads them to believe that he’s genuine, but people are beginning to smell the coffee.

The first sign of trouble was his questionable association with Chicago’s Tony Rezko. Then, we learned that his campaign was privately reassuring Canadian politicians while he simultaneously lambasted the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) to American audiences. More recently, Obama has withered beneath the embarrassing revelations regarding Reverend Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers and his comment about “bitter” working-class voters who “cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

Now, we learn that Senator Obama has cut a private deal with Big Labor, which has a well-known and unfortunate history of connection to corruption. After privately promising the Teamsters that he would work to end federal anti-corruption supervision, he received their endorsement. Apparently, Obama wants to subject practically everything in America to more government supervision – except for the Teamsters.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Senator Obama privately promised Teamsters union leaders that he would advocate terminating the federal anti-corruption oversight board created in 1992, which the Teamsters accepted as part of a settlement agreement.

This federal oversight board originated from a Justice Department racketeering lawsuit in 1989. Throughout the Teamsters hundred-year history, it had been tainted by infamous ties to organized crime, including diversion of union assets toward mafia coffers, the mysterious disappearance of former union president Jimmy Hoffa, witness tampering and other corruption. This history of corruption led to Robert Kennedy’s famous investigation in the 1960s, and ultimately compelled the Justice Department to sue it for racketeering.

This lawsuit forced the Teamsters to the settlement table, at which time they accepted a three-member federal oversight board to investigate and address corruption within the union. Since that time, the board has successfully reduced the number of corruption cases from 70 in 1992 to 8 in 2007. As recently as 2006, a member was expelled for associating with organized crime members.

In other words, mafia influence has been drastically reduced because of the board’s oversight, yet Senator Obama seeks to terminate it.

For their part, members of the board assert that the Teamsters would be unable to preserve the board’s progress without continued supervision, rebutting Senator Obama’s argument. According to board administrator John Cronin, “when we have a case involving a member of organized crime and we send that to the union, the union automatically sends that back to us because they can’t handle it.”

Even Edwin Stier, the attorney brought in by the Teamsters as an internal anti-corruption monitor in the hope that it would end the consent decree, resigned in frustration. According to Mr. Steir, “I haven’t seen anything that the union has done internally that comes close to self-policing.”

But apparently, Senator Obama thinks that he knows better than the board itself. Tommy Vietor, a spokesman for the Obama campaign, confidently assures us that the board “has run its course,” because “organized crime influence in the union has drastically declined.”

This is akin to saying that city police are no longer needed because they have successfully reduced criminal activity.

Surely, the fact that the Teamster’s political action committee (PAC) has contributed some $25 million to elections since 1990, making it the 12^th-largest spender in that period, has nothing to do with Senator Obama’s position.

Yep, nothing to see here, folks.

This all comes at a time when Big Labor is exercising unprecedented influence on liberals in Congress to enact its agenda, including literal abolition of secret-ballot voting for union elections.

Furthermore, it speaks volumes that even Senator Hillary Clinton, who has been known to arrange a political deal or two during her public life, has declined to advocate an end to federal Teamster oversight. So does the fact that President Clinton himself, a backroom wheeler-dealer for the ages, also refrained from taking Senator Obama’s position during his presidency.

The most galling aspect is that Senator Obama advocates greater supervision over almost every facet of the economy and American life, which could use less governmental intervention, not more. Meanwhile, he hypocritically advocates less supervision of the Teamsters, which needs continued governmental oversight, not an end to it.

Coincidence, or political gamesmanship? You be the judge.