Darlene Cavalier isn’t your typical cheerleader. The petite, blond ex-Philadelphia 76ers dancer is driven by a single-minded goal—to reestablish a new-and-improved Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), a Congressional science advisory body that was shuttered by Newt Gingrich and fellow Republicans in the mid-1990s. Cavalier spends her days dashing off countless emails, maintaining her website, www.sciencecheerleader.com, and flitting between her home in Philadelphia and meetings with high-level government officials and members of Congress in Washington, DC.
Cavalier says she’s making headway, partly due to the fact that she doesn’t look like your typical lobbyist. “It’s not threatening for anybody,” she says. “It’s sort of comical. People look at a blond cheerleader and think, ‘What is she doing in our world?’”
After a couple of years in the early 1990s cheering for the 76ers, Cavalier worked in business development at Discover ...
