This is without a doubt the most uninformed pile of drivel I have heard in a long time. Since the Kennedy's in the 1960's every single President brings people from his home base to his administration. Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Regan, Carter, Clinton, Bush and Obama. Bush 41 might be the outlier.
Second the Plum Book is just a list of executive branch jobs that is printed whenever there is a new administration.
If Obama appointed so many cronies, why is it there was basically no corruption in the executive branch the last 8 years. And almost all of the Chicago people where in the political operation, Emmanual, Axelrod, Jarrett and Daley. If you think the Cabinet secretaries had some Magic control, I suggest you read about some of the conversations Between Kennedy and Dillon about congressional testimony. Everything a President does is political.
I disagree with you, both on the issues that what a president does is purely political (the Kennedy example can be contrasted with what LBJ both said and did at the same time as VP that Kennedy made to the specific distrust that Bobby had for LBJ), but I think you don't understand what I meant when dealing with personal appointments in positions of advising or sinecure, but NOT when it comes to the technocratic matters or the general reporting structure of the Beltway portion of the Civil Service. There used to be an understood separation between those areas that no longer exists, and that is even a contrast with Bush Jr. The president has a lot of authority to do PA appointments into civil service or let them go unfilled (Pittsburgh does the same thing) in order to consolidate power. There's much more to the Plum Book than appointments, which is why it's carefully contrasted with each administration to determine what positions are in play versus ones that are left to career civil service or recess appointment.
I'll contrast with couple of good examples from the Democrats. Carter had to end up dealing with a really screwed up civil service from Nixon/Ford and actually had to scrap the old Civil Service Commission to get anything done. I'd even contrast Clinton who appointed Alice Rivlin and Jack Lew who ran OMB (and by extension, the agencies day-to-day) with an iron fist but were as highly respected for competent non-partisan management (although both are committed Democrats) as a model for what is supposed to happen from the Democrats. I've had to work Bush Jr. whose appointees were not as good as Clinton's, but we had the same reporting chain as the Clinton era which kept matters professional (I really would have hated to see the opposite reality if Bush Jr. had the structure that Obama is leaving us in place rather than Clinton's). Not since Nixon do we have such a politicized decision making process for execution. That is a Chicago management style, but what it's going to take is some person really abusing that (Trump is a good candidate for that by the way) to force another hard look at the executive versus the bureaucracy. It's not the people, it's the alteration of the reporting structure from formal to informal that bothers me as it both makes the bureaucracy less accountable and more sclerotic for reasons said above.
And corruption? There's more than just financial corruption, if you don't do anything substantive, I'll concede it's fairly difficult to be financially corrupt (although with mostly, you have to exclude VA (spectacularly and openly corrupt), HHS (not the civil service, the contracting unit), Treasury, DoE, DoD from that generalization). But don't think we didn't learn some not-so-nice political corruption lessons in HHS, DoD, and VA this go around for what happens when you have a non-functional technocratic arm. But incompetence, it's been unusual with a non-permanent OPM head (last two sacked for blithering incompetence, one that still pisses off the Beltway as it was clear that Archuleta was not only incompetent, but almost certainly was politically tone deaf about knowing what was going on in her agency). This informal reporting chain isn't helping anyone.
Uninformed, yeah, I work here, so I know how uninformed I am. I've worked through enough Beltway issues to understand how a professional civil service runs (and doesn't), and have nonpartisan ideas about the structural matters that are not overtly political in nature. I'm not particularly supportive of either party, but I have real problems trying to get people to understand that political management is the first but not the last matter a democracy has to deal with. It's unusual that a politician likes the technocratic management.
Obama's unpopularity among the Beltway crowd is not always racism though I consider racism to be significant. There are plenty of reasons to dislike (or in my case, despise) Obama's handling because it could be done better by the Democrats themselves in fairly trivial ways. I'm not thrilled that Trump is elected (preferred a mainstream Republican), but I don't necessarily think that it's as easy as the pundits attributed it in terms of easy labels for either Hilary or Obama. If the Democrats ran Warren or Sanders, I'm sure they would have run over any and all Republican challengers, but even those two distinguish themselves from Obama as being much more anti-system and at least in Warren's case, have a better track record for taking on the bureaucracy and winning. People always want the easy answers, Obama and Trump (and that was pioneered by Reagan) fall into that pattern. I like Bill Maher, and agree with him as far as he goes, but that doesn't extend to the boring parts of government that I'm familiar with. Those easy answers are a rationalization for what we know now, but like history, I don't think anyone has it right as it is the point of narrative now, but there's certainly something to be said about how ugly this election was for a nation that the narrative said was going the right way. Even from the Democrats (Sanders in particular), that narrative is not quite as straightforward as we would like to believe.