Defining The Count

In a brief item this morning about the number of Latino appointees in the Obama administration, Ed O'Keefe raises what I think is an interesting issue: when you're creating a monitoring system to track Presidential appointments, who do you include? The Post doesn't include U.S. attorneys or ambassadors, he notes, and I also couldn't find any listings for some of the appointed chiefs positions in the Head Count database either. I can understand why the Post focuses mostly on the confirmation process. But given that U.S. attorneys, ambassadors, etc., are vetted, even if the vetting for someone who has to get through confirmation is different, it still seems to me that they take up a reasonable amount of the White House's time and ought to be included as a result.