Are you looking for a smoking gun where Obama issues a memo to campaign contributors saying that people who raise a lot of money for him can get an ambassadorial appointment?
MOST ambassadors are carreer diplomats but that doesn’t mean that others have not effectively bought their position by raising money.
Are you under the impression that I said that the ONLY way to get a presidential appointment is through campaign contributions?
I don’t think thats what I’m saying. I’m saying that some ambasssadorial appointments are given to campaign fundraisers, not because theya re particularly qualified but because they raised a lot of money and the diplomatic corps seems to agree with me.
No, of course not but there are cases where the only connection that the person has to the president is that they raised a lot of money for them. They’re not experts at the country to which they are being appinted, they frequently don’t even speak the language.
Are you serious? Conspiracy theory? You’ve got career diplomats saying that this stuff goes on.
Jeez I didn’t realize taht this was a subject of controversy, I thought it was well known that ambassadorial positions were frequently politcal rewards for excellence in fundraising.
A couple people have already said this, but let me reemphasize it: this is very much what diplomats are paid to do. Negotiations of all levels are intensely personal, and knowing the other side, what they want, and what their weaknesses are brings major benefits in dealing with them.
It’s not controversial, and it IS well-known in the diplomatic corps. Being wealthy and having some qualifications for the job are not mutually exclusive, however. Most appointees have some qualifications for the job, or they would not be approved. That said, it would be uncommon for someone outside the sphere of international dealings to have any sort of depth of knowledge about foreign affairs. This is why they end up in posts like Lisbon and Luxembourg, where they can do the least amount of damage. I can’t recall a political appointee ending up in a shithole, either, as shitholes are often also hotbeds of radicalism. Big fundraisers with aspirations of being addressed as “ambassador” for the rest of their lives don’t want to be posted to Ouagadougu or Ulaan Baatar to acquire the title.
It is a common practice that leading citizens of any given nation are offered such positions. By an extraordinary coincidence, such persons are rich and are vocal supporters of administration policy. But it is a sop, little more, the American equivalent of a knighthood. It is a ceremonial position, and everybody knows it, and acts accordingly.
And of course, a message is sent. A ceremonial ambassadorship sends one of two messages, the first, that your country doesn’t rate, or the other is that relations between our nations are so sound that a “real” ambassador isn’t needful. When we sent Richard Holbrooke, we were saying “This is serious business”, when we sent John Bolton to the UN, we’re saying “Fuck you!”.
Or three, that the President feels that having someone he personally knows would be valuable in that position, as opposed to a career foreign service officer that is an unknown quantity to the White House.
You’re saying that somewhere around one-third of the ambassadorial corps pretty much throughout US history has bribed their way into office. That’s a serious charge that should be backed up with real evidence.
Look, I’ve met quite a few ambassadors (both career and political), including a couple rather notorious political ones. Of course career members of the senior foreign service don’t like political appointments, it can be very damaging to their career. There is an up or out system which insures that if someone can’t keep progressing in their career, it ends. They have every reason to be ticked off when slots go to someone not in their bureaucracy. And seriously, does any “company man” ever like it when the company hires an outsider for an important job?
But one cannot swallow the criticism of political appointments wholesale, writing them off as nothing more than deep pockets that get all the good jobs. There is value in having someone the President knows and trusts in certain positions, and the nature of the political system that we have designed is that politicians need support from their friends to succeed in elections. That doesn’t mean that the friends of politicians are bribing them. Unless shown otherwise, I have reasonable faith that the whole confirmation process, including the FBI investigations into appointees’ finances, would likely discover any actual pattern of bribery and law-breaking.
That doesn’t mean everyone has to like the system, but if they are going to accuse people of serious federal crimes, they ought to either bring evidence to the table or choose their words more carefully.
Well, yes, but writing down how you think the Egyptian ambassador is a dickhead and drinks booze isn’t a helpful form of diplomacy when its brought to light because you should have just kept your thoughts to yourself (and your superiors) without allowing a way for your “less than diplomatic” comments to be recorded and then reported in the press.
You are keeping them to yourself and your superiors when you write them in classified reports. That’s what classified reports are — secret! If you just randomly chatted with your boss, they’d have a massive information overload and no information available when they needed it, so there would be no point. Not to mention, the analysis would be poorer for the medium. The problem was with how the US government was sharing the materials within itself; classified materials are never supposed to be leaked to the press, and generally, they aren’t.