More “Change You Can Believe In” from the administration-elect that promises to shake things up. Joe Biden has named an asbestos lobbyist who worked in the Clinton Administration as his right hand man:
After leaving the Clinton administration in its waning months, newly tapped Vice Presidential chief of staff Ron Klain lobbied for an asbestos industry bailout package, an airline merger, mortgage regulations to help Fannie Mae and a drug-maker under congressional scrutiny for withholding life-saving drugs from dying patients, among other clients.
Klain’s career as a lobbyist, during which clients paid nearly $700,000 for lobbying in which he participated, ended when he left his partnership at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers in 2005.
That makes him eligible to be the top aide to Vice President-elect Joe Biden under the rules outlined by President-elect Barack Obama, who decreed early in his campaign that lobbyists can work in his administration — just not in areas related to their lobbying within two years of that lobbying.
More Clinton folks. This is looking more and more like Bill’s thrid term.
Obama’s first major appointments have been Democrats who worked for President Clinton and did not endorse him in the primary: Transition chief John Podesta and Rep. Rahm Emanuel, who will be White House chief of staff, stayed neutral, and Ron Klain, who will be Joe Biden’s chief of staff, backed Biden. Obama, advisers told Politico, may even be weighing offering Hillary Rodham Clinton herself the Cabinet plum of Secretary of State.
“Obama is showing great good sense in making use of their experience,” said William Galston, a former Clinton domestic policy adviser who’s now at the Brookings Institution. “You have an entire cadre of people in their 30s and 40s and early 50s who were either in senior jobs or second- and third-tier jobs in the Clinton administration, who really earned their spurs and know their way around — and know something about how the institutions in which they served actually function.”
But, the Chairman was supposed to be different. He was going to bring change. This sounds like more of the same.
