By LOU CHIBBARO JR, Washington Blade
Nov 19 2008, 8:48 AM |
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Officials with President-elect Barack Obama’s transition
team this week named at least seven openly gay people to transition panels
assigned to review federal departments and agencies.
Three of the seven gays named to the transition panels —
businessman Fred P. Hochberg, former San Francisco Supervisor Roberta
Achtenberg, and labor attorney Elaine Kaplan — held high-level positions in the
Clinton administration.
The Obama officials also named President Bush’s former
ambassador to Romania, Michael Guest, to a transition panel assigned to review
issues pertaining to the State Department. Guest became the nation’s second
openly gay ambassador when Bush appointed him to the Romania post for a term
lasting from 2001 to 2003.
Several national gay rights advocacy groups, meanwhile,
were said to be considering whether to hold one or more gay-related events
during the week of Obama’s Inauguration on Jan. 20.
During President Clinton’s inaugural festivities in 1993
and 1997, gay groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, the National Gay
& Lesbian Task Force and the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund — held as many
as a dozen events, including a gay inaugural ball.
Gay choruses and gay marching bands also participated in
some of Clinton’s official inaugural ceremonies. In 1993 and 1997, AIDS
activists, at Clinton’s invitation, marched in the official Inaugural Parade
while carrying cloth panels from the National AIDS Quilt.
Officials with HRC, the Task Force and the Victory Fund
said they were deliberating over whether to sponsor gay-related events for the
Obama inauguration, and HRC was expected to announce plans soon for another gay
inaugural ball. But no plans had been announced by mid-week.
The seven known gays appointed to the Obama transition
review teams are among more than 300 people appointed to transition review
panels this week.
“The Agency Review Teams for the Obama-Biden Transition will
complete a thorough review of key departments, agencies and commissions of the
United States government as well as the White House,” a statement posted Monday
on the transition team web site states.
The teams will “provide the president-elect, the vice
president-elect, and key advisors with information needed to make strategic
policy, budgetary, and personnel decisions prior to the inauguration,” the
statement says.
Presidents traditionally appoint members of their
transition teams to middle and high-level posts in their administrations.
Officials working in presidential election campaigns also have been named to
government agency jobs and White House positions under past presidents.
A number of gay rights advocates worked in paid positions
on the Obama campaign, including gay Democratic activists Brian Bond and Dave
Noble. They could not be immediately reached for comment.
Last week, reports surfaced that Obama was considering
appointing his highest-ranking gay campaign official, deputy campaign manager Steve
Hildebrand, as successor to Democratic National Committee Chair Howard Dean.
Dean announced last week that he would not seek another term as chair.
Obama transition spokesperson Stephanie Cutter has said
neither Obama nor the transition team would comment on any potential appointees
to government or party positions until such appointments are officially
announced over the next several weeks.
However, several news media outlets said reliable sources
from the Obama camp disclosed that former presidential contender and Obama
rival Sen. Hillary Clinton was on Obama’s short list to become secretary of
state. According to media reports, Eric Holder, a former D.C. prosecutor who
served as deputy U.S. attorney general under the Clinton administration was also
on Obama’s short list to become attorney general.
Both Clinton and Holder have strong records of support on
gay rights. While serving as United States Attorney for the District of
Columbia in the 1990s, Holder met with gay activists over the issue of anti-gay
hate crimes and created a unit in the U.S. attorney’s office that specialized
in prosecuting hate crimes.
Hochberg, a longtime gay Democratic Party activist from New
York, served from 1998 through 2001 as President Clinton’s deputy and later
acting administrator of the U.S. Small Business Administration.
Achtenberg served as Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of
Housing and Equal Opportunity at the Department of Housing and Urban
Development. She later served as senior adviser to then HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros
during Clinton’s second term in office.
Kaplan served in the Clinton administration as head of the
U.S. Office of Special Counsel, which is charged, among other things, with
enforcing federal personnel policies and laws that prohibit discrimination against
federal workers. Kaplan put in place policies that protected federal employees
from discrimination based on sexual orientation. Those policies were later
reversed by Kaplan’s replacement at the Office of Special Counsel, Scott Bloch,
a Bush appointee.
Bloch recently resigned at the request of the White House
following allegations that he politicized the office’s hiring and enforcement
policies.
Guest had served for nearly 20 years as a career U.S.
Foreign Service officer at the time Bush named him ambassador to Romania in
2001. After completing his term as ambassador in 2003, he became dean of the
State Department’s Foreign Service Institute, which trains Foreign Service
officers.
Guest created a stir in 2007 when he announced he was
retiring from government service, in part, to protest a State Department policy
that denies spousal benefits, including security protections, to same-sex
partners of Foreign Service officers stationed at overseas posts. He said
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had authority to provide some of the
partner benefits but she declined to do so.
Earlier this year, Guest said he was supporting Obama’s
presidential bid.
The other openly gay members named to the transition review
teams, in addition to Hochberg, Achtenberg, and Guest, include Rick Stamberger,
president and CEO of SmartBrief, Inc., an online news publisher; Brad Kiley, an
official with the Washington-based Center for American Progress think tank; and
Thomas Soto, co-founder of Craton Equity Partners, a large “clean technology”
investment fund based in Southern California.
Stamberger is serving on a transition panel reviewing the
White House Fellows program. Kiley and Soto are serving on panels reviewing the
Executive Office of the President, with Soto focusing on the workings of the
White House Council on Environmental Quality.
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