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The Democratic National Committee has quietly reversed the ban on accepting lobbyist donations that Barack Obama insisted on as a good government reform when he was running for the White House eight years ago. Hailed back then as a step to rein in the power of special interest money, the ban was dropped at some point in recent months by the D.N.C. without public notice. But the reversal was confirmed this month by The Washington Post and immediately became a factor in the party’s contest for the presidential nomination, with Senator Bernie Sanders pressing Hillary Clinton to join his call to instantly restore the Obama ban.

The rejection of large donations from special interests is a core stratagem in Mr. Sanders’s small-dollar campaign, allowing him to attack Mrs. Clinton’s ties to big-donor special interests. So far, her campaign has stepped lightly around the D.N.C. reversal, emphasizing instead her calls for wholesale campaign finance reform and her reliance on hundreds of thousands of low-dollar donors in addition to deep-pocketed contributors. But the Clinton campaign has not yet called for reinstating the ban on donations from lobbyists, the Washington insider corps paid to influence government policy in assorted ways, including “money bundling” for favored candidates.

The D.N.C. rationalized its return to accepting lobbyists’ money as necessary for having “the resources and infrastructure in place to best support whoever emerges as our eventual nominee.” This echoes the position of Clinton supporters who say they must not “unilaterally disarm” in the approaching “dark money” war with the Republicans in the general election. In the meantime, of course, there is Mrs. Clinton’s surprisingly tight and increasingly costly primary skirmish with Senator Sanders, whose supporters complain the D.N.C. is deeply biased toward the Clinton campaign.

Political watchdog groups have called for restoration of the Obama ban, warning that its absence will mean a flood of influence buying this year through six-figure checks from lobbyists, particularly via the candidates’ joint fundraising committees with the D.N.C. The joint Clinton committee raised $26.9 million last year to share with the party, while the Sanders joint committee reported only $1,000. Making a virtue of fat-cat penury, the Sanders campaign, which has sizable funding strength from small-dollar donors, has started a petition drive calling for the Obama ban to be restored for the sake of cleaner politics.

After dramatically framing this issue eight years ago, President Obama will have no part of it this year. The White House said donor restrictions should be left to the current candidates to decide. As a candidate, Senator Obama was not so hesitant, telling a cheering Virginia crowd in June of 2008 that he would “not take a dime” from Washington lobbyists. “They will not fund my party,” he thundered. “They will not run our White House.”