Why does it make sense, as an administrative matter, for DOJ and other administrations to rely on fairly conservative credentials in making political hires? This thought from Steve Teles strikes me as basically right:

If you think the key thing that federal bureaucrats do is making decisions, and those decisions are likely to have a substantial ideological component, and you know that there it is impossible for the White House to actually supervise the entirety of the federal bureaucracy--even its senior political appointees--then you've got an institutional problem. In fact, you've got a classical principal agent-problem--how do you ensure that a widely dispersed set of agents act in a way that is consistent with the views of their principals at the center? In particular, if you believe that those agents are in fact surrounded by other agents (permanent bureaucrats) who are not particularly sympathetic to the principals' goals, how do you keep your political appointee agents from going native in order to get along in their local environment? . . . . [T]he best (and to some degree the only really effective) way to solve the problem is by establishing an identity between the principal and her agents. . . .

You want to look for signals that your agents do not care about some of the marks of status of the political mainstream, so that they won't be likely to feel pressure to conform to the belief of "experts" that what you want them to do is bonkers. In addition, you want to know that this person was willing to make a significant sacrifice in terms of "snob value" of their credentials in order to act on their beliefs--this makes the ideological signal much more credible, since their was a cost associated with it. (this is why Federalist Society membership is no longer as valuable a signal as it once was, since the stigma cost of membership has dropped). Finally, there is a much higher probably that at places like Messiah and Regent your agent will have developed a substantial repetoire of justifications for their beliefs, having learned to defend them against a hostile world. This will minimize the likelihood that they will shrink in the face of disagreement.

I'm casting about for a Republican to support in the coming election - there's no reason to let our democratic friends have all the fun of looking for a candidate. Fred Thompson is emerging as someone to look at, at least - and while reading about him, I note that James Dobson doesn't think Thompson is religious enough. That's a reason to take an even closer look at the Senator, of course, because Dobson is a sort of anti-litmus test. But I note this rather extraordinary statement in the article by a Focus on the Family spokesman:

"We use that word—Christian—to refer to people who are evangelical Christians," Schneeberger added. "Dr. Dobson wasn't expressing a personal opinion about his reaction to a Thompson candidacy; he was trying to 'read the tea leaves' about such a possibility."

If that isn't taken out of context, it's a pretty extraordinary admission for an evangelical spokeman. I've long had discussions with various born again people which verged on them saying that they didn't consider non-evangelicals to be proper Christians. But that's a pretty stark proclamation nonetheless.