De la Isla: After cabinet, what's left for Obama?

Remember Hurricane Katrina and how Army National Guard Lt. Gen. Russel L. Honore, "The Ragin' Cajun," became the face of restoring order. He was the commander of the Joint Task Force Katrina when we saw him trudging through the flooded streets near the French Quarter ahead of his armed soldiers, sometimes bringing water and supplies, instructing his troops to be firm, act with restraint, be respectful when looters were around and dead bodies floated out from inundated houses.
We trusted him because Honore was doing what we would like to think we would do under similar difficult circumstances.
Now everyone in the nation is under water.
Voters realized in November the financial dam had broken and so-called conservative economics collapsed. Ousted is that "you-are-in-this-alone" political idea. So too is low-or-no regulation and the honor system for financial markets. Those practices don't square with high public standards, Few among those making obscene salaries yelled the dam was going until after it broke.
Half-a-million jobs are lost already and a deepening recession could last through most or all of 2009. There's talk about the federal government spending up to $1.3 trillion -- a big, if necessary, price to pay for the sophomoric ideas of those educated to know better.
Everyone with a mortgage, a bank account, who plans to buy a car, wants to retire, or wants job stability has a stake in what happens next.
This is where Barack Obama must make sure that the federal government is itself fair and balanced. The same care going into selecting his Cabinet is due to the millions who will carry out the new administration's policies. This can't remain a government with a one-step dance. The recovery is everyone's job. But right now the federal government itself has its hiring practices looking like nepotism, not unlike the fixed financial games that seemed fair and open.
Ever since the early 1970s, numerous Hispanic groups have called attention to the fact Latinos are the only major population segment with serious under- representation in federal employment. Right now Latinos form more than 17 percent of the civilian workforce including Puerto Rico but are only eight percent of federal workers. Latinos are the only racial or ethnic group under-represented like this. This issue goes back four decades and seven presidencies.
Before this national splotch gets swept under the rug again, it's time for Barack Obama to put it on his list of things to clean up.
This message went out from 26 major Hispanic national organizations forming the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda to the incoming president at his request for policy recommendations for his administration.
The Office of Personnel Management (OPM), the government's authorized overseer, is responsible for doing something about it but has a history of doing little or nothing.
Obama knows better than most about having an inclusive government. We need to see more faces like our own solving problems wherever they arise.
We have no choice. Otherwise the yodelers will come back with a new song about entrusting more of the money to them.
Isn't this mostly what the November election settled: who do you trust and in whom do you have confidence? Will the speeches of 2008 still ring true after Jan. 20? Honore was the face of the government at a critical moment in our recent history. Now millions of workers will come calling, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help." Will they come from a stacked government, not open to all.
Like Honore, they need to convey the sense that we are all in this together.

(José de la Isla, author of "The Rise of Hispanic Political Power" (Archer Books 2003), writes weekly commentaries for Hispanic Link News Service. Email: joseisla3(at)yahoo.com.)

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)