Not long ago, I came across a graph breaking down the ethnic diversity of the staffers working on the 2008 presidential election campaigns. A quick scan confirms what many of us already knew, that most democratic candidates have a respectably diverse team of staffers working for them, while the Republicans have a staff that is almost entirely white. In fact, Joe Biden’s staff, the “whitest” of the Democrats’, has double the diversity of John McCain’s staff, which is the most diverse of the republican candidates!

Just for comparison, Hillary Clinton’s staff is 20 percent African American, 15 percent Hispanic, 25 percent Asian and 40 percent white, while Mitt Romney’s staff is 90 percent white, 10 percent Hispanic and 10 percent Asian.  Romney’s numbers are fantastic, however, when we bring Rudy Giuliani into the mix. Over the course of this election cycle, Giuliani’s staff has included a man connected to the mob and a former priest accused of child molesting. What it has not included is an African American, Asian, Hispanic or Native American; his staff is 100 percent white.

These statistics are interesting in and of themselves, but they are even more telling when combined with data indicating the number of women hired at top positions on the presidential campaigns. Here, Republicans and Democrats are nearly equal, with Democrats hiring slightly more women than their Republican counterparts. Clinton, unsurprisingly, has the highest number of women on her staff, including her campaign manager, chief media strategist and policy director. This made me feel slightly better, until I glanced over at the statistics of “America’s Mayor,” Rudy Giuliani. On this particular study’s scale, Giuliani is classified as “very imbalanced.” This was unsurprising, until I realized that the chart was not discussing personality types. It turns out Giuliani is imbalanced in other ways as well; his senior staff has exactly one woman in its ranks. All of this leads me to wonder how a man willing to associate or hire an individual connected to the mob, as well as a scandal-ridden former priest, can find it so difficult to employ someone of Hispanic descent. Perhaps it would be easier if he were also a member of the mob.

It may seem that a candidate should be able to hire whomever he wants without it being of concern to the general public, but in fact, all of this is of particular importance because we are currently witness to an election season in which the candidate field includes a Hispanic, a woman and an African American. At the same time, we have candidates on the opposite end of the spectrum who cannot bring themselves to hire individuals who fit these very demographics. Giuliani, my new favorite villain of the right, clearly is interested in women (as indicated by his three marriages) but refuses to put them on his payroll.  America’s Mayor indeed.

I don’t mean to suggest that a campaign must hire women in order to accurately represent a woman’s point of view, or hire Asians to represent an “Asian” point of view.  There is no way to speak for all individuals of any group, but candidates should make an honest effort to bring a wide range of ideas and opinions into the room before making their policy decisions, and this is best achieved when the candidate’s advisors have diverse backgrounds and experiences to draw from.

No one can predict how any of candidates will behave once elected president, and so we are forced to judge them solely by their past and present actions, and that is why we must take their hiring practices seriously. If candidates cannot bother to listen to opinions unless an individual of a specific race or gender offers them at this stage in their campaigns, there is little reason to believe they will change their ways once in the White House. In fact, Mitt Romney seemingly proved this hypothesis recently, when he commented that, if elected president, the chances of his hiring a Muslim to his cabinet were “not likely.” He made this decision based on religion rather than potential experience or qualifications, and I would say that this statement alone indicates that Romney is not the kind of person we want in the White House.

George W. Bush littered his administration with cronies who had, at some point, demonstrated loyalty to the president, rather than having demonstrated excellence in their field, and one need not look any further than Michael “Brownie” Brown’s disastrous handling of Hurricane Katrina to see the end result of his skewed hiring practices.   We cannot allow our future president to make the same mistake again, and so we should demand that the president’s advisors be hired based on merit alone. We should also begin piecing together all of the information that we have about the candidates, so that we have some semblance of an idea of what the candidate’s priorities really are.   Because if we wait any longer, it will be too late.