Some of those who had made great contributions to Park Geun-hye’s election to the presidency packed up and left, without claiming credit for the win. News commentators were quick to call their departures “beautiful exits.”

Among them is Ahn Dae-hee, a former justice of the Supreme Court, who helped craft Park’s election pledge for clean politics. He had vowed not to use his role as the chairman of a committee on political reform as a stepping stone to advance his personal interests when he had been appointed to the post. He had said, “I have come here for political reform, not to turn myself into a politician.”

On the eve of the Dec. 19 election, he packed up and left his office. He said it was time to leave because his job was done.

But how many people would be willing to spend so much of their time and energy for a candidate if they were not convinced that they would be appropriately rewarded when their candidate won the presidency? It is only natural for a new president to hand out public posts as a reward to those who have helped him or her win the election.

This is not to deny that there are people who are willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause a candidate has been championing, the moral rectitude he has demonstrated as politician or any other laudable attributes they may find in him. But such people are so few and far between that their exits deserve to be called beautiful.

But the cold reality is that a newly elected president has far more people waiting to be rewarded than the public posts that he or she can dish out. Many of those will harbor grudges or even turn antagonistic if they feel slighted in the allocation of spoils. This kind of problem should be worse for such a president-elect as Park, who had pitched a big tent to bring in even those who had previously been her adversaries.

But Park will have to avoid being tempted to take a shortcut to solve this problem, as President Lee Myung-bak did. Lee wasted much of his political capital forcing those left over from the previous administration to vacate the public posts they had been occupying before their terms in office expired. His arm-twisting tactic turned many of his supporters away from him and helped cause a plunge in his approval ratings prematurely.