Despite efforts to create a government that "looks like America," President Clinton's earliest appointments are predominantly middle-aged and male - and not much more racially diverse than the Bush administration, an Associated Press analysis shows.
To considerable fanfare, Clinton appointed a broad mix of men, women and minorities to his Cabinet - the top 18 appointees. But his first wave of sub-Cabinet and White House appointees is not so diverse. In fact, the group as a whole looks quite a lot like the president.A third are fellow Ivy League graduates, while 36 percent are fellow lawyers. At least nine share an even rarer academic distinction with Clinton - they're Rhodes scholars.
Of the first 157 White House staffers and sub-Cabinet appointments announced so far:
- 86 percent are white, 13 percent are black and just one person is Asian American. Of the group, 4 percent are Hispanic. According to 1990 Census figures, 80 percent of Americans are white.
- Nearly two-thirds are men. America's population is split evenly between the sexes.
- The average age of an appointee is 45 years 10 months.
More than half of Clinton's appointees so far, the Cabinet included, are white men 35 and older.
The Clinton administration record so far is only slightly more diverse than his Republican predecessor. In the Bush administration, 87 percent of political appointees were white, according to the Office of Personnel Management.
Clinton can fill about 3,000 jobs through appointments. The posts he has filled so far, however, are the government's primary power brokers - Cabinet secretaries, their deputy and assistant secretaries, agency administrators and White House deputies.
During last year's campaign, Clinton said he planned "to give you an administration that looks like America. I would be astonished if my Cabinet and my administration and my staff . . . is not the most fully integrated this country has ever seen."