Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

All That Experience and No Place to Go

GOP Appointees Scramble for the Few Washington Jobs in a Tough Economy

By Philip Rucker and Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, January 19, 2009; Page A17

The ranks of the nation's unemployed are swelling this week.

As President-elect Barack Obama's team transitions into the federal government tomorrow, President Bush's political appointees will be locked out, and in these tough economic times many of them are scrambling to find new jobs. High-ranking White House loyalists have deluged Washington headhunters with pleas for jobs. Corporations and nonprofit organizations have stopped hiring. With the GOP out of power, jobs on Capitol Hill are scant and K Street lobbying firms have trimmed their golden parachutes.

So this is the new reality: Instead of boasting to friends and colleagues of new jobs in goodbye e-mails, many longtime Bush aides have offered home phone numbers and Gmail and Yahoo e-mail addresses as their new contacts.

"For Republicans, the inn is full," lamented veteran GOP operative Ron Kaufman, a close White House adviser to former president George H.W. Bush and an executive at Dutko Worldwide. "You have lots of folks in the House and Senate on the streets and 3,000 administration appointees on the streets at a time when the job market is shrinking anyways. It's just not a fun time."

Of the roughly 8,000 politically appointed positions in the federal government, hundreds have been vacant since a wave of departures last spring, administration officials said. But appointees who have remained through the final days of the Bush administration have seen an already shaky job market collapse. The traditional avenues of employment for outgoing government officials -- corporations, nonprofit foundations or think tanks -- are clogged because of hiring freezes.

Add to that the November election, in which Republicans lost the White House and dozens of seats in Congress.

"It's a bear market out there, no question, for Republicans leaving the Hill or the administration," said Tom C. Korologos, a longtime Republican adviser and lobbyist who served as Bush's ambassador to Belgium from 2004 to 2007. "In this political business, you live by the sword and die by the sword. . . . You're a caretaker for a while, and all of a sudden there's nothing to take care of and you're gone."

In the current political climate, ties to an unpopular president could hurt candidates. "I think there are people whose connection to the Bush administration will be a kind of taint if they try to stay in Washington," said Calvin Mackenzie, a professor of government at Colby College.

But the most accomplished public servants will be in demand regardless, said lobbyist Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, co-chairs Obama's transition team.

"I think the reports of their unmarketability are exaggerated," Podesta said. "If you're an economist at Treasury and you're smart and skillful, I don't think the fact that Bush was president and Democrats found him to be unpopular will kill anyone's chances of finding a good job."

"The cream always rises to the top," added Nels Olson, of the executive recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International. "Those that are the first-rate individuals out of the administration and who have developed good bipartisan relationships and have solid policy experience will be able to make the transition."

Still, one day last week, Michael Castine, also of Korn/Ferry, said he had received calls from half a dozen senior White House aides "who don't have anything in the hopper yet " He said, "They are loyalists who stayed the course and are not sure what they're going to do."

A host of Republican heavyweights have been inundated with résumés from Bush appointees seeking jobs. In the toughest spot are those leaving junior staff positions in the White House, Congress or federal agencies. During the boom years, they could land comfortable jobs in the nation's capital, but Andrew H. Card Jr., Bush's former chief of staff, said he has "suggested that they broaden their horizons beyond the Beltway."

Kaufman, a close friend of the Bush family, helped many loyalists land appointments at the beginning of the Bush presidency. Now, he said, "I'm telling most of these folks, 'Go home. Take the expertise you've learned here, go back home and apply it to a trade back home.' "

The problem is, few of them want to go home.

"We're talking Washington," Korologos said. "There's an old saying, you know, they never go back to Pocatello," he added, referring to an Idaho railroad town.

Some Bush officials have succeeded in their job searches. Jim Wilkinson, a former top aide to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and most recently chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr., is moving to San Francisco, where he will become managing partner for international business and financial strategy at Brunswick Group, a global communications firm. Rice, meanwhile, will return to Stanford University, where she had been provost before joining the Bush administration.

"If they're star-type people, we're certainly interested in them," said Thomas H. Boggs Jr., a partner at Patton Boggs, a Washington law firm. "But it's going to be a lot worse than it was eight years ago because of the economy."

Bush appointees who can afford the luxury are taking time off. White House press secretary Dana Perino plans to travel with her husband to volunteer in South Africa at the Living Hope Community Center, a beneficiary of Bush's anti-AIDS initiative.

"I didn't want to sit around the house thinking about what I want to do next," Perino said. "I wanted to do something that would help others."

Perino said many White House employees have been too busy in the final months of the Bush presidency to look for new jobs, but acknowledged the difficulty.

"Certainly it's not the roaring days of the dot-com boom or the 52 months of growth we saw during this administration," Perino said, getting a plug in for her boss's economic record.

Still, for many Bush appointees, this is the first time they've been on the job market for years, if not decades. Many came to Washington during the 1990s to take jobs in the Republican-controlled Congress, only to move into the administration after Bush's 2000 election.

"These are people who haven't put together a résumé in 20 years," said Steve Gunderson, a former Republican congressman who is president of the Council on Foundations. He has been reviewing résumés of those seeking jobs in the nonprofit sector. "It's a first for them in developing résumés, applying for open and competitive jobs, and trying to figure out where their skills might work best."

Tom Davis, a powerful Republican congressman from Virginia, retired last year and landed a seven-figure job at Deloitte Consulting, a global financial services company, as the economy started to tank. But he said many of his GOP colleagues "didn't get out soon enough" and are stuck with few opportunities. The market is so poor, Davis said, that some senior GOP congressional aides "are fighting over taking a pay cut from $130,000 to $140,000 to just $60,000 to $70,000."

Davis often repeats a saying passed down by his grandfather, a former Nebraska attorney general: "There is nothing as desperate as a defeated politician looking for a job."

© 2009 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/18/AR2009011802157.html [comments at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/01/18/AR2009011802157_Comments.html ]

---

and see/compare/contrast in particular (items linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=2765155 (source link for that one now http://www.mediatransparency.org/story.php?storyID=18 ) and preceding and following)