Scott Spiegel

“[Y]ou have to wonder what some of the Obama era’s most moneyed and White House-connected lobbyists were thinking as they preened before a Washington Post reporter recently for two lengthy articles. We’re not even nine months into the new administration, yet these swaggering, utterly un-self-aware influence peddlers seem determined to prove that nothing except the party affiliations has changed in the Beltway’s pay-for-play culture since Tom DeLay. If these lobbyists were stocks, I’d short them…

“Barack Obama promised a change from this revolving-door, behind-closed-doors collaboration between special interests and government. He vowed to ‘do our business in the light of day’ — with health care negotiations broadcast on C-Span — and to ‘restore the vital trust between people and their government’…  That those lobbyists would so extravagantly flaunt their undiminished role shows just how little they believe that a new sheriff has arrived in Dodge.

“In his scathing Wall Street Journal column on The Post articles last week, Thomas Frank crystallized the gap between Obama’s pledge and this reality. ‘There is something uniquely depressing about the fact that the National Portrait Gallery’s version of the Barack Obama ‘Hope’ poster previously belonged to a pair of lobbyists.’

“At the first anniversary of the TARP bailout of the banks, we can see how far [Obama] has to go.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/opinion/04rich.html?_r=1

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