According to Maureen Dawd’s article titled “Field of Dashed Dream’ appearing on August 16 New York Times, President Obama took a strong verbal punch on the chin from a woman supporter at a town hall meeting at the Seed Savers Exchange in Iowa.
She asked the President "what had gone wrong" with him, and continued:
“So when you ran for office you built a tremendous amount of trust with the American people, that you seemed like someone who wouldn’t move the bar on us. —
And it seems as if your negotiating tactics have sort of cut away at that trust by compromising some key principles that we believed in, like repealing the tax cut, not fighting harder for single-payer. Even Social Security and Medicare seemed on the line when we were dealing with the debt ceiling.”
I don’t understand what ‘move the bar on somebody’ mean. I checked the meaning of this phrase on the Google, but couldn’t find out any definition.
Best Answer
I think that the woman is coining metaphors based on the phrase, raise the bar. To raise the bar means:
So, if you raise the bar you are raising standards--the "bar" is a metaphor for those standards. To then say that someone is moving the bar implies that someone is shifting the standards around, and not necessarily for the better.
The woman is saying that, when Obama was elected, he promised to stand by X standards. Now, however, he has moved the bar on people and is now standing by Y standards. In other words, he is being weasely and not sticking by the standards he set.
I don't think this is standard English, so I wouldn't use it in conversation.
Edit: @Phoenix brings up the related metaphor moving the goalposts which is more common. It means:
Unlike moving the bar on us, which may be more regional, this phrase seems a lot more common. A quick Google Ngram yields:
You could definitely use this phrase in conversation to describe this situation, and it is possible that because it is more common you would be more widely understood.