For more than a year the American people have been tortured, ad nauseum, with the Obama campaign theme, “Change We Can Believe In.” Republicans… and a few curious Democrats… have asked to be enlightened on the exact meaning of that theme, but to no avail. Their inquiries have been met either with stony silence or meaningless platitudes… most equating to whatever is the anti-Bush theme of the day in Democratic circles.

But now that Obama is the presumptive president-elect we’ll very soon get to see exactly what he meant. (Obama will not be the president-elect until sometime around noon EST, on Monday, December 15, when the Electoral College votes… in spite of the fact that he regularly stands behind a podium in his transition headquarters with the words “Office of the President-Elect” emblazoned across the front.)

Given the unparalleled level of enthusiasm for (and fear of) the Obama presidency, the American people are now fully focused, politically. What they are about to witness is just how difficult the process of staffing a new administration can be… especially for Democrats. Having been through the White House staffing mill on two occasions in Republican administrations, where appointments are most often based on political considerations AND qualifications, I can paint a fairly accurate picture. It goes something like this:

The president selects his top aides and cabinet officials, twenty or so, and they each select their top twenty aides and deputies, giving us, roughly speaking, the top 400 political appointees. But then, each of those 400 people selects their top fifteen or twenty people and we quickly have 6,000 or 8,000 political appointees in the executive branch. The problem is, by the time we get to the third echelon of political appointees there is very little consideration given to qualifications or competence. It’s all based on who has enough political muscle to beat out the competition. Just picture the pushing and shoving at a Japanese subway stop at rush hour and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what it’s like.

What it boils down to is that, by the time the top 6,000 or 8,000 appointments are made in the executive branch, the level of incompetence is such that it comes very close to representing a violation of the president’s oath of office.

As presidents go, Obama is not off to a very good start. His very first selection was Rahm Emanuel as White House Chief of Staff. Emanuel is a foul-mouthed, mean-spirited political hatchet man, a product of the corrupt Chicago Democratic machine. He is famous for once having mailed a dead fish to a Democratic pollster who he felt had been disloyal. In Mafia circles, sending a dead fish to someone means they will soon be “sleeping with the fishes.”

Was he serious? Fox News has reported that, on another occasion, during Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, Emanuel rose to speak at a dinner gathering. Then, as he rattled off a list of names of people he felt were “disloyal Democrats,” he repeatedly stabbed a knife into the dinner table, shouting the word “Dead!” after each name. It puts one in mind of Hillary Clinton’s favorite intimidator, Los Angeles private investigator Anthony J. Pellicano.

While working for actor Stephen Segal, Pellicano reportedly harassed LA Times reporter, Anita Busch, who was writing a series of stories about the relationship between Segal and a reputed mob figure. When Ms. Busch found a bullet hole in her windshield she called the cops. On the front seat they found a dead fish with a long-stemmed red rose in its mouth and a one-word note saying, simply, “STOP!” (So what is this fascination Democrats have with dead fish? Could that be why they’ve reelected Harry Reid as Senate majority leader?)

Following the Emanuel appointment, one of the worst political appointments of all time, Obama floated the name of Jamie Gorelick as his nominee for Attorney General. However, we were soon reminded that it was Gorleick who authored the infamous “Gorelick Wall” memorandum during the Clinton Administration… a directive that prohibited the FBI’s intelligence division from telling the criminal division what they knew about the 9/11 hijackers, before the attack.

Now Obama is floating the name of Eric Holder, another “bad boy” from the Clinton Justice Department. During his tenure as Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno, Holder ignored all of the objections of the FBI and signed off on Bill Clinton’s pardon of fugitive financier Marc Rich. This after Rich’s ex-wife, Denise, made a $500,000 contribution to the Clinton library foundation, the Democratic National Committee, and Hillary Clinton’s U.S. Senate campaign.

When the Clintons left the White House in January 2001 and the Bush people moved in, they found a lot of unfinished business relating to the Clinton scandals. In all, some 112 individuals and two corporations were indictable on criminal felony offenses during Clinton’s second term. Of those, 57 were indicted, 54 escaped indictment, and 3 resigned rather than face prosecution. Of the 57 who were indicted, 41 were found guilty, one was acquitted by a DC jury, three were granted immunity in exchange for their testimony, and 12 never went to trial.

The Bush Justice Department, incompetent as they were, simply looked the other way and failed to indict or to prosecute the guilty. They did, however, leave a large pool of “talent” from which Barack Obama now appears to be staffing his administration. If he continues along that path… choosing Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State, for example, he’ll be bringing Bill Clinton and all of his dirty laundry back into the White House. He won’t be giving us the “change” he promised, he’ll only be buying more of the Clinton’s soiled underwear.