POSITIONS AVAILABLE: The state of Iowa has openings on a number of regulatory and oversight boards. The successful applicants must have zero political clout and must not have amassed any wealth to speak of. The more obscure the individual, the better. Candidates who have contributed to political campaigns need not apply and will, in fact, be screened out and dropped from consideration. If you’re economically challenged and a virtual nobody, apply to Gov. Chet Culver, State Capitol.

The above fictional recruitment advertisement is an exaggeration, of course, but not by much given the near-hysterical response to two of Culver’s recent appointments to the Iowa Board of Regents. Newspapers across the state carried banner headlines in weekend editions linking the appointments of Democrats David Miles and Bonnie Campbell to their contributions to Culver’s campaign, as if their financial support was the sole reason for their appointments. Miles and his wife, Loree, gave $39,500 to Culver’s campaign, and Campbell and her husband, Ed, gave $23,000.

Amid all the ranting and raving about this, almost no one is mentioning that another Regents nominee, Craig Lang, president of the Iowa Farm Bureau Federation, is a Republican who gave $20,000 to Jim Nussle’s gubernatorial campaign. That would poke holes in the balloon the pundits are floating, that money buys influence. Of course, someone could try to advance the theory that Lang got the appointment because the organization he heads, like the Culver-Judge administration, opposes local control over hog confinement siting.

The Board of Regents is lucky to get Miles, who was a principal in Investors Management Group, a wealth management firm with an enviable client list when it was sold to AMCORE Financial Inc. in 1998. That helped him earn a reputation as a smart and savvy business person, so it’s no surprise John Pappajohn asked him to serve as chief financial officer for one of his latest ventures, Countryside Renewable Energy Inc. That job and others in his career provided Miles with the kind of real-world experience that is so valuable to the Board of Regents as it helps, among other things, to transfer the innovative technology being developed at Iowa’s state universities and research parks to the private sector. He also knows his way around higher education, having served on Drake University’s Board of Governors for 11 years, including three as the group’s chairman.

Campbell, a former Iowa attorney general and gubernatorial candidate and Clinton Justice Department appointee, chaired Culver’s campaign and is one of his closest advisers. She’s smart and knows how to get things done. The governor trusts her. Should he appoint people he doesn’t know and trust?

Miles and Campbell are the type of people you’d want on the Board of Regents – period. To draw lines through their names because they’re well-heeled financially and politically active is muddy, wrong-headed thinking. It’s reverse snobbery to suggest that anyone who can afford to give to a political campaign should automatically be excluded from consideration.

The real issue is that campaigns require the kind of cash the Mileses and Campbells gave to the Culver-Judge ticket. For more on that, read Tim Urban’s excellent guest commentary on the opposite page.

e-mail Beth Dalbey at bethdalbey@bpcdm.com.