“They won’t work in my White House!” candidate Obama proclaimed about lobbyists. This was never true. Obama has hired about 100 lobbyists, and now he’s just promoted one of them: revolving-door K Street Democratic operative Ron Klain is now Obama’s Ebola czar.
Klain served as chief of staff to Janet Reno and then Al Gore in the 1990s, and as Joe Biden’s chief of staff recently. In between, of course, he was a corporate lobbyist.
Klain worked at O’Melveny & Myers, lobbying on behalf of Fannie Mae, U.S. Airways, Time Warner, Cigna, ImClone, and other companies and industry groups.
Lobbying on “regulatory issues concerning Fannie Mae” in 2004, as disclosure forms indicate Klain did, involved convincing Congress and Fannie Mae’s regulators that Fannie Mae wasn’t doing anything dangerous, and wasn’t exposing taxpayers to risk. In other words, Ron Klain got paid to help fuel the housing bubble up until a couple of years before it popped.
