About a month ago, Whitewater’s common council filled an at-large vacancy left after Marilyn Kienbaum’s passing. I thought the process – applicants speaking on behalf of their possible appointment – was a good one. See, Common Council Session of 12.18.12: A New Councilmember.
My remarks here aren’t about those four initial applicants, but about applicants, generally.
Without appointed positions for boards and commissions in the city, we’d either have myriad elections or no one representing their neighbors outside of those few on our common council.
And yet, and yet, there’s a risk with appointees: where do they really stand? It’s not a problem with those running for office, as during an election, someone’s bound to ask: what’s your platform?
That doesn’t always happen with would-be appointees: they most often apply for meritorious and principled reasons, but a few may apply because they’d like to be noticed, think they’d be one of the adults in the room, or through an overweening sense of entitlement.
Offering a statement of conviction – a brief declaration of views – has two advantages.
First, a straightforward declaration of political belief gives those appointing someone a principled reason to advance or set aside an application. This benefits all the community, to choose after considering an applicant’s convictions over status or ambition or an unrealistic sense of entitlement.
Second, though, an appointment process that asks applicants to speak on their own helps sincere applicants. For someone who feels himself or herself entitled, and who is able to wheedle a way onto a committee, there will be no benefit to speaking plainly on behalf of one’s candidacy. (After all, if someone can get onto a board through scheming self-promotion, the right route, through hard work and clarity of purpose, will be unnecessary.)
But a process that asks an applicant to speak on his or her own behalf emphasizes the individuality of the applicant, and keeps that person from seeming only the servile protégé, friend, or tool of an existing office-holder.
An applicant who’s too closely tied to an office-holder is an applicant with a limited political career. When the office-holder moves on (or scurries away), the appointee is left with nothing except a reputation as a cat’s paw.
A political career based on an individual’s clearly-stated convictions will have high and lows, but it will have a future, too.
Social climbing, trying to Gatsby a town, so to speak, sometimes works – it just doesn’t keep working.
When it stops working, there’s no way to make it work again. This is one of the most certain consequences of a failed administration: when it disappears, its special friends and coddled appointees are finished politically, too.
It’s a shame, that someone should throw away his or her public role within in a city, by relying too much, and trying too hard, through manipulation over conviction.
I’m reminded of Roosevelt’s observation about Herbert Hoover’s political oblivion, as historian Richard Norton Smith recounts FDR’s remark:
Not even the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor could bring Hoover back into the mainstream of official Washington, D.C. Within days of the attack, Roosevelt summoned Bernard Baruch to the White House for a discussion of how best to organize the home front for victory.
Courageously, Baruch said that the best man for such an effort was Herbert Hoover. What’s more, Baruch knew him to be available. FDR shot down the idea with devastating sangfroid. According to one who was there, the president said, “I’m not Jesus Christ. I’m not raising him from the dead.”
Hoover’s conduct was different, of course, but the result was the same as in our time. From some mistakes, there’s no way back.
Better for appointees to have great careers, and perform solid work for their communities, by standing on their own.