"Patronage does not mean giving a job to someone who supported you politically."

"It means giving a job to someone only because he supported you politically." So wrote Rudy Giuliani in his book "Leadership," quoted in this WaPo article, which airs the views of his critics:

Giuliani "had a blind spot when it came to people he knew well" and "very little respect for the vetting process," [said Jerome Hauer, who briefly headed the office emergency management.] "The competent people in the administration all tended to leave because they got tired of the borderline-incompetent people who got in. He ran off the professionals because they were difficult to work with. If they didn't do things the way he wanted or overshadowed him, he got furious."

Fran Reiter, a deputy mayor under Giuliani, said most initial Cabinet hires came via a "very extensive search process," but the mayor was more likely to emphasize personal ties when it came to public safety jobs. Giuliani wanted ownership over that realm because of his law enforcement background, she said. And he worried that department veterans who he did not have ties with would have more allegiance to the departments than to him.

"These were areas where he just really wanted people whom he trusted and who were not going to do anything other than what he wanted them to do," she said.

Giuliani's most ill-fated promotion, other than Kerik's, was his 1998 choice to run the city's Housing Development Corp.: Russell Harding, the son of the former head of New York's Liberal Party, whose backing of Giuliani was crucial in his election. Harding had no college degree or background in housing and finance, and was eventually convicted of stealing more than $300,000 from the agency and sentenced to more than five years in prison for the embezzlement and for possessing child pornography.

More in the article. This is an aspect of the Giuliani candidacy we need to study carefully.