A recent NY Times weblog post (sorry, behind the select-wall) by Stanley Fish highlights the importance of the power of appointment, which we hear about occasionally prefaced by "Supreme Court" or "recess":

It is that consequence of electing a Republican president that should be stressed. Democrats should make the power of appointment the electorate's prime consideration. And they will be in a good position to do so because the Republican nominee, whoever he is (no "she's" in sight) will not be able to repudiate the appointments of the outgoing administration. He will have to answer for the sins committed by the incumbent's toadies, and he will have no answer. So the question shouldn't be what will this nominee do for the country, but whom will this nominee put in charge of the institutions that determine the quality of everyone's life, and why should we trust someone who comes from a party that has performed so disastrously in this area for so long?

I agree that appointments are one of the most important and underappreciated factors in choosing a President, and that Bush's have been singularly incompetent and/or corrupt. Any Republican President would appoint a few more pro-lifers, friends of the mining and timber industries, and union-busters, but that's not the argument at hand, because some people prefer these appointees. The claim is that a typical Republican would choose appointees of Miers-level incompetence.

Most people seem to agree that Bush is an exceptional President; if nothing else, his Nixonian poll numbers suggest that he's not just a typical Republican. So at least superficially, I see this as a specifically Bushian problem rather than a Republican one. Democrats don't suffer from an overwhelming toady gap compared to Republicans as a whole, and I suspect most people are reluctant to blame one man for the shortcomings of another's lickspittles.

But is there a case to be made that the flamboyant cronyism of the last six years is a Republican trait?

Update: It turns out there may be a Dem/Rep crony gap! From the piece Josh linked, Daniel Metcalfe, a long-time Justice hand, notes:

In my experience over 11 presidential administrations, from Nixon I to what can be called Bush III, there is an unmistakable drop-off in overall appointment quality during a second presidential term -- and this definitely is more so during a Republican administration. Perhaps this is due to there being a lower quality of political appointees in Republican administrations to begin with, given that, by and large, they give up more than Democrats do to enter government service, especially with the post-Watergate ethics restrictions that all government officials face.