THE
IDEALISTS
cial crisis and end three decades
of economic policy that favored
the super-rich over the middle
class. “My heart started to sink.”
The first three days of Obama’s
presidency began boldly, with the
president signing a series of executive orders and memos that
seemed to almost reverse the polarity of the executive branch after
eight years of the Bush administration. There were new orders on
transparency and open government, on ethics for political appointees and forbidding the hiring
of lobbyists. Obama banned torture and vowed to close the prison
in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
But on the fourth day, the White
House also issued a waiver to permit William Lynn, a lobbyist for
defense industry giant Raytheon,
to become deputy secretary of defense, circumventing the new ban
on hiring lobbyists. Brian and her
colleagues at the Project on Government Oversight were horrified.
“We were: ‘WHAT?’,” she said.
It turned out to be only the first
of many waivers for corporate lobbyists, making a mockery of the
lobbyist ban, which nevertheless
still had the unintended consequence of making it nearly impossible for public-interest lobbyists
HUFFINGTON
11.04.12
to move into the administration.
Gay activists who had campaigned for Obama without reservation increasingly felt stabbed
in the back. When supporters
asked in early January whether
the administration would get rid
of “don’t ask, don’t tell,” the mili-
“HE WAS GOING BACK ON
A CAMPAIGN PROMISE
THAT COULD HAVE SAVED
THOUSANDS OF LIVES.”
tary’s ban on openly gay soldiers,
incoming press secretary Robert
Gibbs famously answered with
one word: “Yes.”
“That one-word answer turned
into a lot of mumbles after that,”
Aravosis recalled. After just a few
weeks in office, Obama punted
the matter to a Pentagon working
group, which was given a year to
study the matter.
Then another blow: In June
2009, the Obama administration
continued the Bush administration’s legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA),
the federal law defining marriage
as between a man and a woman.
Obama had promised to repeal it.
“You’ve got to be on the right