07:03 pm
Obama the Politics of Ambassadorial Appointments
Via Jason Zengerle over at TNR, it looks like there’s a tempest brewing over Obama’s use of political appointees to fill ambassadorships. The first story cropped up about three weeks ago in The Washington Times:
The White House, unaware of historic norms, had been on track to give more than the usual 30 percent of ambassadorial jobs to political appointees until objections from career diplomats forced it to reconsider, administration officials say. . . .
The decision to uphold the historic ratio of 30 percent political appointees and 70 percent career diplomats came only after members of the Foreign Service protested to White House staff and Mrs. Clinton’s chief of staff, Cheryl D. Mills, officials said.
“There was some question about how sacrosanct the 30 percent was,” the senior administration official said.
Although the 30-70 ratio is not official, “all administrations have adhered fairly closely to it in the last several decades,” said Steven B. Kashkett, acting president of the American Foreign Service Association (AFSA), the diplomats’ union.The U.S. has 175 ambassadorial posts.
Mr. Obama ran on a pledge to emphasize diplomacy and transparency but appeared to be well on his way to inflating the number of political appointees as ambassadors until the Foreign Service intervened.
“Why is ours the only profession where it’s considered acceptable to appoint someone without any experience?” Mr. Kashkett said. “Would you appoint someone to head a hospital without medical experience?”
Even if the White House respects the 30-70 ratio, “we still have concerns,” Mr. Kashkett said. “Thirty percent is not a comfortable number. We feel very strongly about the importance of appointing primarily professional diplomats as ambassadors.”
Dennis Jett, described in The Daily Beast as a “former diplomat” (by which I presume they meant that he’s a retired foreign service officer) added his voice earlier this week:
Despite the obvious damage, this corrupt exercise is repeated every four years—and there seems to be no hope that it is going to change under President Obama. The “system,” of course, is the awarding of plum ambassadorial postings to major campaign donors—cash for cachet. . . .
In his first six months, Obama forwarded to the Senate 58 nominations for ambassadors. Of those 32, or 55 percent of the total, were political appointees. In the same time period, his five predecessors made more nominations—an average of 67—but the number of those who were political was lower at 47 percent. . . .
The failed states and economic basket cases are left to the career officers. The industrialized democracies of Europe and Asia and the island nations of the Caribbean are the destinations of the political appointees.
Scott Horton over at Harper’s joins in:
The process cheapens our diplomatic relations and sends a bad message to the states to which these ambassadors are sent. And it’s getting cruder and greedier. A cynic studying the latest batch of nominees might conclude that the price of an ambassadorship has soared from roughly $200,000 under the Rovian regime to $500,000 under Rahm Emanuel. Under Barack Obama, the process of political payoff through ambassadorial appointments has matched and appears poised to exceed the already extremely abusive system that Karl Rove put in place under the Bush Administration. . . .
Political appointees are not per se objectionable. In fact, some of the most distinguished ambassadorial appointees in recent decades have been political appointees—not career diplomats. Think of Mike Mansfield, Walter Mondale, and Howard Baker, each serving ably in Japan, or Pamela Harriman and Felix Rohatyn, who served in France. Each of these appointees was a prominent figure on the Washington stage whose appointment added luster to Washington’s relationship with the nation to which he or she was sent. But the Obama political appointees are of a different caliber. What distinguishes them is not a career in public service or finance, much less foreign relations or foreign area expertise, but rather something far grubbier: raising substantial sums of money for the Obama campaign. . . .
The point here is not that any of these picks are unworthy individuals, but rather that the main criterion by which they seem to have been chosen is their fundraising savvy for Democratic causes. That creates the impression around the world that these posts are political trinkets, which seriously degrades the post and stands as a barrier to Obama’s efforts to reassert American leadership.
It’s clear that none of these nominees came out of the State Department.
Not to sound cynical, but my initial reaction here was. . .you’re surprised? That Obama has appointed some donors as Ambassadors? Captain Renault, white courtesy phone please:
My intent here is not to defend the current system — which is flawed — nor to defend specific individuals named by Horton as examples of the donor-to-diplo racket (although, as Zengerle notes, the individuals he names have more going for them than merely their ability to bundle money). Instead, I want to point out one small but inconvenient fact: the arguments made by AFSA’s Kashkett (in the Times story), Jett, and Horton all contain a syllogism that would make Aristotle blush.
A substantial number of Obama’s ambassadorial nominees are political appointees (rather than foreign service officers).
Some of Obama’s appointees are major donors.
Therefore all of Obama’s political appointees are major donors.
Uh, no they’re not. In fact, some of those appointed by the Obama Administration are foreign policy experts who have a long history of working on the countries and/or issues in question.
I don’t have the luxury of reviewing the entire list of Obama appointees, but permit me to name just three individuals who I happen to know personally.
Lee Feinstein is nominated to serve as U.S. Ambassador to Poland. Feinstein served in State as Deputy Director of Policy Planning during the Clinton Administration and has spent time at Brookings, Council on Foreign Relations, and Carnegie.
David Killion is nominated to serve as U.S. Ambassador to UNESCO. Killion also served in the Clinton Administration and more recently was a senior policy advisor on international institutions to the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
Bonnie Jenkins is nominated to serve as Coordinator for Threat Reduction Programs, with the rank of Ambassador. Jenkins was a senior program officer at the Ford Foundation and a Naval reservist who took leave from her duties at Ford to go on active duty.
Did these individuals give money to the Obama campaign? I’m sure they did. But they’re not major donors or bundlers. I don’t know whether people with similarly impressive professional credentials and small checking accounts also received nominations at the start of the Bush and Clinton Administrations. I’m sure some did — but I’m guessing that they were fewer and further between.
Horton bemoans the lack of “prominent figure[s] on the national stage,” yet fails to acknowledge the inclusion of Jon Huntsman, the former Governor of Utah, to serve as U.S. Ambassador to China, and Tim Roemer, a former Congressman and member of the 9/11 Commission to serve as U.S. Ambassador to India. (And one other thing, Mr. Horton — Pamela Harriman and Felix Rohatyn may have been prominent figures, but they also were major donors.)
To its credit, the Washington Times story does not make this assumption, noting elsewhere in the story that some of the political appointments are going/will go to Obama, Biden, and Clinton foreign policy advisors, and speculating that complaints from the foreign service were likely to prevent some of them from getting their posts (and by inference, not having an impact on appointments of the money men and women).
The foreign service does an outstanding (and largely unheralded) job of representing U.S. interests overseas. Its members deserve not merely our respect but our admiration. That’s why the list of Obama ambassadorial picks includes a number of distinguished members of the foreign service.
The reality here is that AFSA, which represents the interests of the foreign service, is worried that the foreign service is not getting its traditional share of the pie. They said the same things eight years ago when Bush came to office and sixteen years ago when Clinton got elected. It’s a time-honored Washington ritual.
I am sure that other foreign service officerss of equal or greater talent will be nominated when all is said and done. Some, to use Jett’s lovely turn of phrase, will go to “failed states and economic basket cases,”** but some won’t.
The reality is that AFSA (to its credit) is doing what any good union should do: defend its members’ hard-won privileges. They have every right to do that, but their arguments would be far more credible if they at least acknowledge that some of Obama’s nominees have credentials as good as members of the senior foreign service.
**I wonder how the governments of these supposed swamp pits will feel when they discover that foreign service officers named to be ambassadors don’t want to serve in their countries. That’s not exactly diplomacy in action.
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