Reply #99: Political payback isn't about qualified or not qualified.

[Renegade08]

I have a different understanding of qualified. I think there are millions of qualified people to be in the administration, if you go just by objective factors (experience, skill-sets, etc.).

The question is, how do you pick someone from a large pool of qualified candidates?

Same thing with Supreme Court nominees. There are many, many people out there who are qualified and "deserve" to be a Supreme Court justice. It's a shame, for example, that Laurence Tribe never got serious consideration. He "deserves" to be a justice, but I would not want Obama to consider him as a candidate. Tribe's time has passed, due to bad timing. Other factors, besides objective individual qualifications, then, will end up being the decisive factors. The question is, what should be the most important decisive factors? I think diversity should be considered, but, it shouldn't be the main factor, and we shouldn't rely solely on "bean counting" to conclude, one way or another, that Obama seriously opened up his process to ensure that women and minorities were given serious consideration.