Alicia Mundy of the Wall Street Journal uncovered one of those classic stories of Washington ego-stroking, hidden in a morale-boosting retreat:

At a recent retreat for Food and Drug Administration employees, a slide show likened the agency’s top drug regulator, Janet Woodcock, to “visionary leaders” such as Golda Meir and Gandhi.
Some lawmakers are fuming about a $1.5 million contract for morale-boosting that the FDA awarded the consultant that prepared the slideshow….
Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, said of the slide presentation: “It’s a cinch that if I spent a nickel of taxpayers’ money to rank myself with [Sam] Houston and [Stephen F.] Austin, I’d have some explaining to do after the laughter died down.”

Today, Mundy notes that a long-time Naderite is burrowing into the FDA drug-approval machinery, soon to be known as the drug-denial machinery:

Over three decades, Dr. [Sidney] Wolfe, head of the health group at [the] advocacy organization Public Citizen that Ralph Nader founded, has helped push 16 drugs off the market and slap restrictions on several multibillion-dollar products. He has been so hostile to the FDA under President George W. Bush that he decried its 100th-anniversary celebration in 2006 as a “propaganda campaign” to hide its “unprecedented assault on the American public.”
Now the outsider is going inside, mirroring a larger shift in the Washington pendulum toward tougher company regulation. To the consternation of the drug industry, Dr. Wolfe has been appointed to a four-year term on the FDA’s Drug Safety and Risk Management Committee, which plays a key role in telling the agency which drugs are safe.

Mundy’s eye for detail shows late in the story:

At his 70th birthday party in 2007 — with Marlo Thomas and husband Phil Donohue in attendance — his children serenaded him with a song tweaking his obsession. The chorus was: “A drug, a drug: Sidney pans a drug.”
Over the years, his targets have included the painkiller Vioxx, which Merck & Co. withdrew from the market in 2004, and GlaxoSmithKline PLC’s diabetes drug Avandia, whose sales have plunged after the company was forced to add a black-box label warning about heart risks.
Dr. Wolfe’s single-mindedness occasionally ticks off his own groupies. Years ago, he opposed painkiller lollipops for kids dying from cancer, leading Boston anesthesiologist Maureen Strafford, a drug-safety proponent, to snap: “Is there any drug Sid Wolfe likes?”

Welcome to the Era of Obama.