THE
IDEALISTS
him. Given the chance, they won’t
make the same mistake twice.
THE PATH TO HEARTBREAK
Even at the beginning, some Cassandras of the public-interest
community — particularly those
who’d been around longer — were
skeptical that Obama would deliver the change he had promised.
Nan Aron, the longtime president of the Alliance For Justice,
which advocates for reshaping the
judiciary in a more progressive
direction, had learned during the
Clinton years that Democrats can
behave very differently from Republicans once they seize power.
They’re not as aggressive, she
said — especially on many of the
issues she cares about most deeply. And Obama’s slogans didn’t
persuade her otherwise. “There
was no ‘audacity of hope’, with respect to the work that we do,” she
said. “I was afraid that with the
economy and health care consuming all the political energy, our
issues were going to be sent to the
back of the line.
“I told friends when he was
elected: ‘I’m just counting the moments until my heart’s broken,’”
Aron said.
As it turned out, heartbreak came
HUFFINGTON
11.04.12
faster for some than for others.
For the gay community, the elation ended abruptly when Obama
invited evangelical pastor Rick
Warren, an outspoken supporter
of Proposition 8, the anti-gaymarriage ballot initiative in California, to give the invocation at
his inauguration.
“It was unfathomable that
he would pick this right-wing
bigot,” Aravosis said. “I had
friends who didn’t even come to
the inauguration.”
Aravosis remembered thinking
to himself: “We’re totally screwed.
If he’s willing to do this to us,
then what else is possible?” Now,
he says, “I think that to some degree, that was totally prescient.”
For supporters with other interests, Obama’s earliest political
appointees were a dismal sign of
what was to come.
Less than three weeks after
the election, Obama announced
that his economic team would be
led by two consummate financial
insiders: Timothy Geithner and
Larry Summers.
“Policy is personnel, and you
bring in these people, and for me
the handwriting was on the wall,”
said Jeff Faux, the founder of the
Economic Policy I nstitute and
one of many progressives who had
hoped Obama would hold Wall
Street accountable for the finan-