Buiter on Bhagwati

Willem Buiter offers his view on the Jagdish Bhagwati's article, Obama's free-trade credentials top Clinton's. Buiter's third point is interesting,

Third, Obama is willing to lie about and to deceive the voters about his true views on trade policy and about his future policy intentions, should he be elected president. You can only become the Democratic candidate for the US presidency if you are prepared to act in a dishonest and unprincipled manner. Obama is willing to pay that price. While Obama plays tough cop on NAFTA in Ohio, his chief economic advisor Austan Goolsbee (whom I knew when he was an undergraduate at Yale University and one of the bright young lights guided by Jim Tobin) plays nice cop at the Canadian consulate in Chicago. There’s a useful lesson here for young Austan, one that anyone interested in becoming active in hands-on politics should heed: there is no such things as ‘off the record’.

In so far as it is true that any candidate has to say one thing and do another, you have to ask what are the voters thinking? Why can they not see that a candidate would do this and vote accordingly? If Buiter's point is correct do voters only have themselves to blame?