ing Clinton’s presidency has been bereft of bankers because so few bankers are willing to come to Washington under current rules and practices. The position of solicitor general, traditionally reserved for a prominent law professor, went in the second Clinton term to an administration insider. Two vacant seats on the Security and Exchange Commission were filled in 1997 not by people with broad experience in the financial markets or as state regulators but by a thirty-six-year-old congressional staffer and a thirty-four-year-old White House lobbyist. So it has gone, in this administration and those immediately preceding it.The appointment process is no longer merely a mechanism for filling important jobs, no longer simply a personnel selection process. It is a political and policy battleground of the first order--one in which the qualifications of nominees are often merely incidental to the real purposes of those who support and oppose them. Too many good people decline to enter this obstacle course, or get ambushed by it, or waste too many months enduring it. Perhaps there are charms of this process that justify maintaining it in its present form. But, if so, they are even harder to detect at the end of 1997 than they were when Obstacle Course was published a year ago....
