[T]he White House has found it harder to attract a top-flight team because some candidates are unwilling to give up lucrative posts to come to Washington to be White House cheerleaders.
One economist, who was rumored to be up for a position on the Council of Economic Advisers, said he could not take a job that has been steadily pushed to the sidelines over the past two years. “You can’t be attracted to a job where you’d be out of the loop,” he said.
[…]
[S]ome Republican economists say the administration’s top economic jobs have been marginalized, while their inhabitants have been publicly humiliated.
“Why would you want to take a job where you have no influence?” asked Bruce Bartlett of the conservative National Center for Policy Analysis. “What’s the point?”
President Bush has chosen Allan B. Hubbard, a longtime friend and fund-raiser who helped shape Mr. Bush’s platform in the 2000 campaign, to be director of the National Economic Council, the White House said on Monday.
In his new job, which does not require Senate confirmation, Mr. Hubbard will coordinate economic policymaking across the administration and serve as a senior economic adviser to Mr. Bush. Currently the president of E&A Industries, a manufacturing company based in Indianapolis, Mr. Hubbard served in the administration of the president’s father as executive director of the Competitiveness Council, a White House group established to reduce regulation on business, and as deputy chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle.
Mr. Hubbard has known Mr. Bush since the two attended Harvard Business School at the same time in the mid-1970’s. He was one of the top fund-raisers for Mr. Bush’s 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.
It’s something of a pattern with this gang. When in a jam, forget merit and qualifications and turn to wealthy and loyal friends.