The Washington Post editors start strong, appearing to be raising their first real criticism of the new administration:
President-elect Barack Obama is executing the pirouette familiar to politicians who inveigh against Washington: First you run against its insiders, then you hire them. During the campaign, the candidate made some overly broad promises about ejecting lobbyists from the government (“When I am president, they won’t find a job in my White House”) and flayed John McCain for being surrounded by phalanxes of them. Now, as president-elect, he is trying to adjust those declarations to the reality that an absolute ban on lobbyists would be both unnecessary and self-defeating.
But the Post’s editors can’t quite bring themselves to raise specific cases or question how, for example, healthcare lobbyist (they call him a “consultant,” but let’s get real) Tom Daschle can pass the test. They don’t explain, let alone identify, the members of the transition team who come with “a complicated tangle of ties to private influence-seekers.”
They do manage to throw out this vague admonition:
These rules can be criticized as either overly stringent or unduly lax. On the stringent side, it seems silly to prohibit lobbyists from giving advice in the very fields of their expertise; well-qualified advisers will no doubt be excluded as a result. And it seems similarly odd to single out lobbyists for special prohibitions, when, say, union leaders are free under the rules to give advice on the Labor Department transition or pharmaceutical company executives are permitted to participate in the health-care review.
But they don’t name names, and they leave the reader confused as to whether President-elect Obama successfully navigated these traps. This, I suspect, will be par for the course for some time. Things will be “of concern,” and items will be “worth further thought,” but no exacting inquiry will be forthcoming. The media is still in full swoon. It will take years for them to return to the blunt talk and sharp critiques which they regularly delivered to other presidents.
