BRISTOL, Va. - Basking in his new status as the Democratic standard-bearer, Barack Obama announced on Thursday that his party will adopt the same restrictions on donations that his campaign has put in place.

Under the new policy, the party will no longer take contributions from registered lobbyists or special-interest political action committees. 

Obama talked of the change as he touted his plan to overhaul the health care system during a visit to Bristol, Virginia.

He said pharmaceutical companies, health-maintenance organizations and other interests had too much clout in Washington and were the reason for the failure of past efforts to change the health system.

“If we’re going to make real progress, this time must be different,” he said.

“As the Democratic nominee for president, I’m announcing that going forward, the Democratic National Committee will uphold the same standard. We won’t take another dime from Washington lobbyists or special interest PACs,” Obama said.

“They will not fund my party. They will not run our our White House. They will not drown out the voices of the American people,” he said.

Obama’s visit to the state two days after capturing the Democratic nomination highlighted his hopes of putting the historically Republican-leaning state into play in the general election.

Bristol is a rural town in the southwestern part of the state.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obama steps out of car)

Hillary might be the Clinton running for president, but it’s Bill that GQ magazine doesn’t want to lose. Washington D.C.’s new chronicler of wonks, the Politico newspaper, reported that the magazine killed a story on Hillary Rodham Clinton , the New York senator and former first lady who wants to capture the Democratic nomination for U.S. president.From the Politico’s Ben Smith:

Early this summer, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s campaign for president learned that the men’s magazine GQ was working on a story the campaign was sure to hate: an account of infighting in Hillaryland.

So Clinton’s aides pulled a page from the book of Hollywood publicists and offered GQ a stark choice: Kill the piece, or lose access to planned celebrity coverboy Bill Clinton.

Despite internal protests, GQ editor Jim Nelson met the Clinton campaign’s demands, which had been delivered by Bill Clinton’s spokesman, Jay Carson, several sources familiar with the conversations said.

Smith notes that there is nothing new about campaigns providing more access to sympathetic reporters. The difference here, he wrote, is “what sources described as a barely veiled transaction of editorial leverage for access.” And in the case of Joshua Green, the Atlantic Monthly editor who reported the GQ story, the campaign didn’t quite consider him sympathetic based on his past stories.

The Clinton campaign did not reply to our request for comment. Green declined to comment. GQ gave us the statement that it gave Politico, attributed to editor-in-chief Jim Nelson:

I don’t really get into the inner workings of the magazine, but I can tell you yes, we did kill a Hillary piece. We kill pieces all the time for a variety of reasons. Other than that, I don’t have a lot more to add about what’s going or not going into the magazine.

A spokesman for Conde Nast, which publishes GQ, would not comment further, leaving us with one unanswered question: How does an editor-in-chief not get into the inner workings of his magazine?