[Choice Times=Joo-hyun Park, CEO of Jae-Dam Entertainment]

Hearing that the confirmation hearing for Lee Hye-hoon, scheduled for the 19th, is facing serious difficulties, I find myself thinking hard about it. Is President Lee Jae-myung’s philosophy of appointments really about “putting the right person in the right place,” or is it closer to a system of “hostage management”?

If you open President Lee’s personnel file, a strange common pattern emerges. Rather than flawless and highly capable figures, those occupying key posts tend to be individuals with fatal weaknesses or serious blemishes on their records.

There is a physical limit to turning his former lawyers in his own cases—his private “soldiers”—into public officials. So instead, he seems to have chosen a different method: picking up people with nowhere else to go, so-called “defective goods,” and remolding them into a survival-based loyalist faction.

Let’s think about this in plain common sense. Clean, competent people have no reason to show blind, brainless loyalty to a leader. When unjust orders are given, they can hit the brakes—or, if things turn ugly, they have an exit strategy: resignation.

Those entangled in corruption allegations are different. The moment they step outside the fence of this administration, what awaits them is, at worst, a cold prison cell, and at best, social burial. In other words, a forced “community of fate” is formed, in which their own survival depends entirely on the boss’s grip on power.

The trajectory of former floor leader Kim Byeong-gi is perfect proof. Once a core pro-Moon figure personally elevated by the Moon Jae-in administration, he became, after the change of government, a front-line enforcer who eagerly slaughtered his former pro-Moon allies. Through the lens of common sense, he looks like a turncoat. In Lee Jae-myung’s algorithm, however, he is classified as “the easiest tool to control.” The fact that a petition containing allegations of nomination bribery ended up not with an oversight body but in the hands of Kim Byeong-gi himself, the party involved, starkly reveals how this cartel operates. It is an unspoken contract: “I’ll cover up your weakness—so you bark more fiercely for me.”

The appointment of Lee Hye-hoon fits this exact same logic. Why insist on nominating her as a ministerial candidate when she has been branded a “traitor” in conservative circles and left politically homeless by crude recorded remarks? It is not because of outstanding ability. It is because, outside this administration, her political life would be physically finished.

The more isolated a person is, the more desperately they cling to the boss. If she survives this crisis, Lee Hye-hoon will serve Lee Jae-myung as her liege lord and devote herself fully to loyalty.

“Hey, I took all the abuse for protecting you—got cursed out by Hankyoreh, by Kim Eo-jun, by Kyunghyang—I did it all!”

Coin-scandal Namguk may have stepped down again after yet another incident, but won’t he be called back before this administration ends? The talent pool is already painfully shallow, and around Lee Jae-myung there can be no aides left who still possess normal common sense.

A normal personnel system collapses, and its place is filled by “hostages” seized by their own weaknesses. These people do not watch the public’s eyes. They care only about the mood of the lord who holds their leash. Just as petitions are torn to shreds, the state’s public systems are also being ripped apart under their instinct for survival.

A leader who purchases loyalty by holding weaknesses as collateral ultimately reduces the entire organization to private property.

The most dangerous thing about them is not incompetence. It is that they are “edge-of-the-cliff technicians,” fully prepared to ignore laws and procedures lightly if that is what survival requires. It is a truly unique “governance of weaknesses.”

#HostageGovernance #PoliticsOfWeakness #PowerAndLoyalty