In trying to woo white, middle-class Rust-Belt voters in Pennsylvania, Barack Obama is sticking to a major point that he hopes plays well with unionized, anti-Washington types — he claims he doesn’t take contributions from lobbyists and that the K Street types won’t have a say in his White House. Only trouble is, it’s not 100 percent true.

In his column, Craig Crawford notes: “Obama is careful to claim in the ad that he does not take money from ‘Washington’ lobbyists. That’s because he does take money from state-based lobbyists.”

‘It’s a politically smart position for him to take. It sounds profound. But in fact neither PACs nor lobbyists give a lot to presidential campaigns.’

Politifact.com outed Obama last August for his lawyerly wording in his adverts that left him loopholes to leap through to avoid the lobbying thing:

And Obama still accepts tens of thousands of dollars from people who work for Washington firms that do substantial lobbying. Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle is an Obama contributor who isn’t a registered lobbyist, but works as a consultant for Alston & Bird, a lobbying firm in Washington.

The Center for Responsive Politics found that Obama accepted $55,019 from employees at lobbying firms, and much more from companies that are not classified as lobbying firms but have lobbying divisions.

So we give Obama’s statement a Half-True on the Truth-O-Meter. While Obama can accurately say that he does not accept money from federally registered lobbyists, he still accepts thousands from people in the influence industry.

The Columbia Journalism Review also has done some homework on Obama’s assertions and found them wanting in veracity:

To explain: Opensecrets.org, the Web site of the Center for Responsive Politics, is the most authoritative source on campaign finances. Basing its reports on data from the Federal Election Commission, the Center shows that Obama indeed doesn’t take much money from a sector the Center calls “lobbyists.” Through the end of December, Clinton received more than $800,000 and McCain around $400,000 from this group, which the Center says includes people who work for lobbying firms at the local, state, and federal level and their relatives who are not otherwise employed, as well as those who are officially registered as Washington lobbyists. Obama received contributions of about just $86,000 from this group. Obama’s Web site says he doesn’t take money from Washington lobbyists or political action committees,and the Center says that if his campaign finds that the money came from registered Washington lobbyists, it does get returned.

How meaningful is this? “It’s a politically smart position for him to take. It sounds profound,” says Massie Ritsch, communications director for the Center for Responsive Politics. “But in fact neither PACs nor lobbyists give a lot to presidential campaigns. He’s not leaving a whole lot of money on the table by eschewing PACs and lobbyists.” PAC money represents only about one percent of all the money in a presidential race because, Ritsch says, so many people donate that their contributions dwarf PAC money.

OK, so it’s not like saying you dodged sniper fire as you zigzagged across a Croatian runway like Hillary Clinton did, but it does beg the question of whether Obama is really fundamentally any different than any other presidential aspirant who will basically say anything if it serves his ends. I suppose it wouldn’t rub me the wrong way if Obama wasn’t positioning himself as a different kind of animal altogether.

Although he describes himself as an agent of change, taking rhetorical license on the lobbying issue sounds like more of the same old to me. And to think there for a minute I had the audacity to hope the rhetoric matched the reality.