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These are some of my personal, editorial opinions about various issues surrounding Presidential Appointments

COMPENSATION: Presidential Appointments are political patronage - whether the compensation is money, power, prestige - whatever the payoff to the individual appointee.  While there has been a generous dose of public service given to the Nation by appointees in 200 plus years, no small amount of the process has been self serving, service to private agendas, or to causes.  The point of the process is to manage or serve certain policies.  That is selfish in nature.  Reasonable money compensation only makes sense, but a good solid portion of self sacrifice and personal service doesn't hurt anything either.  We need to be careful about how generous we are in compensation.  To the extent that every citizen should be able to serve, even if poor, we should provide compensation and cover monetary expense - meeting the standards of the world for high pay may not serve the public interest at all.  Competing with the private sector on pay may not be a very good idea for the people's interest.

HAND WRINGING ABOUT THE APPOINTMENTS PROCESS: The patronage process by definition puts the power of selection in the hands of an executive leader.  That is an irritating situation if you happen not to be on the inside, able to influence the Executive.  Certainly there is value in commentary about the entire selection process, but the selection routine has always worked the same way, and will continue to work the same way as long as powerful leaders can choose people to work for them.  You can take your own shot at how much patronage is a good thing, but it is difficult to imagine a government where the people who make primary policy and work closely with the Executive to made decisions are not "serving at his pleasure."  Executives do not put their enemies in a position to hurt them - that makes no sense whatever.   Without question, however, continued comment in the public sector about qualifications and reasons for selection of certain people to serve the Country, and scrutiny of their finances and purposes for wanting to serve, improves the quality of government servants.  It is sort of fun to read some of the critical material, however.  Often there is a thin line between good wine and sour grapes

Copyright 2001-2011 John Isaacson --Contact Information: John Isaacson, Director@Presidential-Appointments.org - Call: 617 504 3699