The meaning of patronage

Just when you think you've heard it all...

The Weekly Standard's Jonathan V. Last writes (in the Philly Inquirer) about the Bush administration's chronic and deeply self-destructive problem with putting people in important jobs whose only real qualification is political loyalty. It's positively Soviet. Last focuses on Monica Goodling, who was the Justice Dept's liaison to the White House, and who was last heard from refusing to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, citing her Fifth Amendment right to avoid self-incrimination. Here's Last:

Goodling's background is curious. Now 33, she graduated from Messiah College, an evangelical Christian school, in 1995. After a year at the American University Washington College of Law, she enrolled at Pat Robertson's Regent University Law School in 1996 - the year it received full accreditation from the American Bar Association. She graduated from Regent in 1999. That November, Goodling went to work for the Republican National Committee as a junior research analyst in the opposition research shop. When her boss, Barbara Comstock, left the RNC to head the Office of Public Affairs in the Ashcroft Justice Department, Goodling went with her.

After spending two years in Public Affairs, Goodling was detailed to the U.S. Attorney's Office for the Eastern District of Virginia for a two-year stint in order to get the "field experience" typically required for the attorney general counsel's job. She served only six months. (The head of EDVA at the time was Paul McNulty, who, having since become a deputy attorney general, also played a role in the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys.)

According to my research, Goodling was the lead attorney on three felony cases while at EDVA. All three ended in plea agreements; none was of particular importance. To give a sense of the magnitude of her work, the highest-level defendant was sentenced to four months in jail; the other two were given three years of supervised release - one of these also received a $100 special assessment. Nevertheless, upon her return to Justice, Goodling assumed the senior counsel and White House liaison posts. So much for the best and the brightest.

Of course, that's not completely fair. There's nothing wrong with attending fourth-tier schools. The value of college is vastly overrated, and lots of smart people don't go to Harvard. But when you look at the rest of Goodling's bio, it is not obvious why she was participating in serious, senior-level decisions about the hiring and firing of U.S. attorneys.

Take, for instance, Carol Lam. She graduated cum laude from Yale, attended Stanford Law, and clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. After serving as an assistant U.S. attorney in the 1980s, Lam was appointed to the bench in the San Diego Superior Court, before becoming a U.S. attorney in 2002. She is a past recipient of the Attorney General's Award for Distinguished Service. This is the woman whom Monica Goodling - Messiah, Regent, RNC - was working to help remove.

You know how we conservatives are supposed to be all about elitism -- the good, meritocratic kind, in which the best and brightest are rewarded for their skills, their education and their talent by being given lots of responsibility? That doesn't exist in this administration, whose affirmative action for hacks has pretty much destroyed the conservative party's claim to competence. No wonder Carol Lam and the other US Attorneys were so insulted. This crew didn't have the legal chops and courtroom experience to navigate Judge Judy's courtroom, and there they were sitting in judgement of their betters.