What a difference an election makes. The Executive Branch is transitioning from a country club ruled by incompetents whose primary qualifications are drinking-buddy appeal and Jesustude to a budding administration drowning in résumés from several hundred thousand of America’s most brilliant. In real-time, we’re witnessing our government’s metamorphosis from a bumbling cast of Brownies and Goodlings to a pool of candidates so brilliant that it would make Google drool.
According to the LA Times, the incoming Obama administration has received a whopping 290,000 applications for employment. And they expect around a million applicants through their www.change.gov site by inauguration.
That’s one million job seekers hoping to fill 8000 available positions. To put this in perspective, Bush 2000 had 44,000 applicants. Sure, Bush is hardly a poster child for achievement, but, before him, Clinton ’92 pulled in 125,000 applicants.
According to one Biden staffer, whose connections are making him a rising commodity on facebook, the depth of the talent is amazing. But the deluge of employment solicitations is causing some of his colleagues to take defensive measures:
Others have responded to all the incoming messages by trying to lower their Internet profile, removing their Facebook pages from public access and trying to keep their names out of the newspaper.
Many of us are disappointed with some of the "continuity" that’s appearing in Obama’s incipient administration. But if there’s any change I can appreciate in the wake of the last eight years, it’s the introduction of competence to governance. No more Gonzalezs, Meyers, Goodlings or Brownies. And no more government for the idiots, by the idiots. That’s change I can believe in.