VAGUENESS-IN-CHIEF

Posted at 8:50 a.m. ET

One of the raps against President Obama is that he's vague.  You never know, according to the charge, exactly where he stands or what his policies will be.  The Politico seems to confirm that in a fine story this morning, examining the president's lobbying reforms.  The key word is "loopholes."

President Barack Obama’s new ethics rules concerning lobbyists appear to be written right out of Wednesday’s headlines — the scandalous ones.

And while they represent the most aggressive attempt by an administration to rein in lobbyists, a host of loopholes that have bedeviled reform efforts for years won’t be plugged by the president’s executive order.

Other stories out today regarding the closing of Guantanamo and new rules for interrogating terror subjects feature the same vagueness.  Rules will be issued, but how tight they'll be still remains a mystery.

Interestingly, though, what the rules don’t do is prohibit lobbyists from working in the Obama administration, which shouldn’t be surprising, since quite a few of them have already been named to it.

A sample: Attorney General-designee Eric Holder was a lobbyist with Covington & Burling, Deputy Health and Human Services Secretary-designate Bill Corr advocated for the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids and Vice President Joe Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, was a player at O’Melveny & Myers.

Yeah, we noticed all that change we can believe in.

The Obama rule banning former presidential appointees from lobbying any part of the administration during his term — including a second one, if he wins reelection — is a sweeping prohibition that goes further than any similar presidential good government rules.

But what it doesn’t do — and can’t do — is ban former government officials from lobbying Capitol Hill, which is where the bulk of legislative advocacy happens anyway.

Such loopholes are notoriously common in rules aimed at containing the influence of lobbyists.

There's always the matter of interpretation:

The strength of Obama’s commitment, of course, will rely heavily on the independence and interpretations of the White House and Justice Department attorneys. In Bush’s case, he had their blessing each time he withheld records.

But, in fairness, most experts quoted in the story say that Mr. Obama's effort is the most far-reaching, and that is good.  We now have to see how all this plays out in the real world.

January 22, 2009.