Cross' latest offering in the Courier-Journal contains this little doozy: "But most Republican voters seemed to conclude (inaccurately, we reiterate) that Fletcher did no worse than his Democratic predecessors...
" Cross, is that what may have happened in the Fletcher administration regarding personnel decisions pales in comparison to what Democrats have done for years. Your reiteration is wrong. Being from Albany, where Republicans are still in the majority but Democrats controlled state jobs, you should know that.
In fact, the best evidence of this occurred right next door to your home county in Wayne County, also a staunchly Republican County: I know because my mother, Fern Baker, was Wayne County Democratic Chairperson for 9 years during the Wilkinson and Patton administrations before she succumbed to cancer Aug. She was a member of the prestigious Ford Society. In all those years, I know of no one in Wayne County in all those years who was hired for a state job based on qualifications, NOT ONE, but always on political afiliation.
Pretty damning stuff, huh? To have the son of the local county Democrat chair make this kind of statement? Things were so bad before Fletcher took office that even after he was inaugurated, many mid-level managers with hiring power were heeding the recommendations of their local Democrat party officials and elected officials instead of the recommendations that came from Fletcher administration officials.
It's pretty bad when even in a Republican administration, Democrats are controlling the hiring process, isn't it? That's one reason the Personnel initiative was started; to take control of hiring away from Democrat officials and Democrat state employees who owed their jobs to patronage and were just biding their time until the next Democrat administration. And that's exactly what was happening.
The entrenched Democrat bureaucrats were hoping that if they continued to curry favor with the Democrat power brokers during the Fletcher administration, their loyalty would be rewarded the next time the Democrats took power. We once heard it said that even though Cross comes from a Republican family, when he took the Frankfort bureau chief job at the Courier-Journal, he registered as an independent to avoid any charges of conflict of interest. Even then, detractors would call him "that Clinton County Republican.
" We've also heard it said that many Republicans thought it appeared that he bent over backwards to be critical of the GOP so as to dispel any notions that he was partial to his family's party. Even though Cross is gone from the C-J and now only writes a semi-monthly column, he's still despised in many Republican quarters. With columns like his most recent, it's easy to see why.
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