President Bush’s crop of political appointees includes fewer women and minorities than did President Bill Clinton’s at comparable points in their presidencies, according to a new report by House Democrats.
Women made up about 37 percent of the 2,786 political appointees in the Bush administration in 2005, compared with about 47 percent in the Clinton administration in 1997, according to the report and supplemental data released last week by the Democratic staff of the House Government Reform Committee. Similarly, about 13 percent of Bush administration appointees last year were racial minorities, compared with 24 percent in the fifth year of Clinton’s presidency.
Unlike the Democratic report [.pdf], the Post noted that Bush is the first president to appoint a minority to any of the top four Cabinet posts: State, Defense, Treasury, and Justice. And he has appointed three minorities to those jobs.
But there’s another problem with the Democratic analysis. Presidents usually draw their appointees from the ranks of their supporters, and they tend to reward constituencies that support them. Get more support from the South, and you’ll likely appoint more Southerners to office. If Catholics vote heavily for one party, that party is likely to appoint more Catholics. That’s partly a matter of rewarding your voters, and partly a reflection of the pool of supporters you can draw from. If blacks vote 9 to 1 Democratic, it’s likely that a Democratic president will have more blacks among his campaign workers, contributors, and party faithful. By that criterion, Bush has lived up to the demands of affirmative action better than Clinton.
In 1996, about 58 percent of Clinton’s voters were women, 11 points higher than the percentage of women among his appointees. In 2000, about 47 percent of Bush’s voters were women, about 10 points higher than the percentage of women among his appointees.
More dramatically, Clinton got 27 percent of his votes from minorities, compared with 24 percent of his appointees. Bush got only 9 percent of his votes from minorities, but 13 percent of his appointees were minorities. So an identity-politics advocate would say that Clinton under-rewarded his minority supporters while Bush over-rewarded his.
The people who are going to manage vital services ought to be selected on the basis of their qualifications, not their race and gender. (Appointees who are merely going to be involved in useless and unnecessary federal programs can, I suppose, be selected on some other basis than ability and experience.) But to the extent that we’re going to look at “diversity” criteria, it seems appropriate to note that Bush has appointed more women and minorities in proportion to their presence in his coalition than Clinton did.