Several recent ambassadorial appointments show that the Obama administration is continuing the decades-old tradition of nominating influential campaign donors to coveted posts overseas.
Since Obama’s reelection, top diplomatic posts in Spain, Belgium,
Italy and the UK have been given to top donors. According to
Bloomberg no fewer than 26 of the administration’s serving and
nominated ambassadors were major Democratic campaign
contributors.
In the UK for example, new ambassador Matthew Barzun, a
42-year-old technology entrepreneur, raised at least $1.2 million
for President Obama’s re-election campaign as its finance
chairman.
The administration also recently nominated John Phillips as
ambassador to Italy. Phillips, a lawyer who according to
Bloomberg raised $500,000 for the last Obama campaign, would
replace financial investor David Thorne, another top Obama donor
who is also Senator John Kerry’s former brother-in-law.
More recently, the announcement this week of Caroline Kennedy as
Ambassador to Japan also indicates a preference for using
prestigious diplomatic appointments as rewards for help on the
campaign trail. As the only surviving child of former president
John F. Kennedy and the torchbearer of that political dynasty,
Caroline Kennedy’s early 2008 endorsement of Obama helped propel
his campaign forward against his formidable challenger, former
first lady and later secretary of state Hillary Clinton.
It was Caroline Kennedy’s 2008 piece for The New York Times
entitled 'A President Like My
Father' which lent Obama major support from the family,
along with an endorsement from former Massachusetts Senator
Edward Kennedy.
Still, although Ms. Kennedy is trained as a lawyer, her lack of
political experience has led some critics to question whether she
is up to the task. An aborted New York Senatorial run for the
open seat left by Clinton in 2009, when she accepted the top spot
at the State Department, also seemed to ding Kennedy’s political
aura.
Clyde Prestowitz, the current president of the Economic Strategy
Institute in Washington and the man who led US trade negotiations
with Japan, questioned why the administration chose to appoint
both Kennedy and her predecessor John Roos, a technology lawyer
and a top Obama donor, neither of whom speak Japanese.
“We’re playing this game with
one hand tied behind our back,” Prestowitz told Bloomberg,
in reference to the US-led negotiations for a Trans-Pacific trade
agreement this week.
Kennedy’s appointment has also rubbed some Washington foreign
policy insiders the wrong way. David J. Rothkopf, the CEO and
Editor-at-large of Foreign Policy magazine, as well as a member
of the Council on Foreign Relations, wrote a scathing review of
her appointment on Thursday.
“The Kennedy nomination is
perhaps the first time in history that an individual has been
nominated for a top ambassadorial post primarily for having
written an opinion column,“ wrote Rothkopf.
Likewise, members of the foreign service have previously
expressed irritation that top diplomatic missions have gone to
“campaign bundlers”
rather than career diplomats.
“Now is the time to end the
spoils system and the de facto ‘three-year rental’ of
ambassadorships,” the group's governing board wrote in a
2012 statement.
“The appointment of non-career
individuals, however accomplished in their own field, to lead
America’s important diplomatic missions abroad should be
exceptional and circumscribed, not the routine practice it has
become over the last three decades,” they added.
According to data gathered by Bloomberg from the Federal Election
Commission records, former donors awarded ambassadorial posts
gave an average of at least $523,000 to Democratic candidates
from 2008 to 2014. Meanwhile, The New York Times has reported
that the ambassadors’ aggregate contributions likely exceed $21.6
million.
Still, since Obama’s first term in office, some 65 per cent of
appointees to diplomatic posts have been career foreign service
officers, as compared to 35 per cent political appointees,
according to the American Foreign Service Association. That group
estimates Obama’s track record is in line with US presidents
dating back to Ronald Reagan.
Though Obama may only be carrying on tradition, some of his past
appointments have nonetheless backfired. Last year for example,
the former ambassador to the Bahamas, Nicole Avant, made
headlines after a State Department Inspector General’s report
estimated she had spent over 40 per cent of her time away from
her assignment, the majority of which was spent in her Beverly
Hills home.
A year prior, Cynthia Stroum, a major Democratic fundraiser
appointed by Obama as ambassador to Luxembourg, had left that
embassy in a “state of
dysfunction,” generating a working environment that was
“aggressive, bullying, hostile, and intimidating” according to a
January 2011 report by the Inspector General.