All The President’s Cronies
Atrios linked to this item on how the Obama team “has notified all politically-appointed ambassadors that they must vacate their posts as of Jan. 20.” The end of the item observes:
Most ambassadors, of course, are foreign service officers, but often the posts involving the most important bilateral relations (such as with Great Britain, Japan and India) or desirable locales (such as the Bahamas) are given to close friends and well-heeled contributors of the president.
I had always just thought of this is a kind of casual, widely accepted corruption. But recently I did learn the official story as to why this is good practice, namely that an important political supporter or a friend of the president is likely to have a much easier time of getting access to the Oval Office than any mere foreign service officer would. Thus, it’s arguably better for the host country to have a political appointee than a career FSO. Therefore, this practice helps build good-will and so forth.
Not sure I buy that, or even that the person who explained it to me buys it, but that’s the story.
51 Responses to “All The President’s Cronies”
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December 3rd, 2008 at 7:25 pm
It’s a fair argument – in practice, it depends. Just because someone is a friend or political supporter of the president doesn’t mean they’re not also talented, hard-working and honest (although the current president’s circle perhaps not a great demonstration of this). In that case it can work well and the argument’s legitimate. But it’s not such a great idea to replace an experienced professional with a well-connected idiot.
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:42 pm
You are probably a big dollar Obama supporter, I’m guessing three figures at least. Maybe you can get appointed Ambassador to Latvia. You’ve written favorably of Andris Biedrins. You know John Podesta. What more could they want? I’m serious.
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:48 pm
I think it’s a decent theory, but to make sense it requires you having a president who ignores people UNLESS they’re already his close friends and ESPECIALLY if they’re competent career professionals. Happily, we soon will no longer have a president like that. Instead, we will have a president who, apparently, makes an effort to pay attention to people in direct proportion to what he perceives to be their experience and expertise, rather than in inverse proportion to it. So I think the theory is rendered inoperative at about noon on January 20th.
December 3rd, 2008 at 7:53 pm
The Bahamas sound nice, but what I’d really like is for our new president to create a new ambassadorship to Monaco for me. Bahamas are a close second, though. Or maybe Costa Rica?
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:09 pm
All I have ever aspired to be is an ambassador…or a philanthropist. Then again, maybe you have to be the latter to become the former.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:49 pm
But recently I did learn the official story as to why this is good practice, namely that an important political supporter or a friend of the president is likely to have a much easier time of getting access to the Oval Office than any mere foreign service officer would.
Oh please. Now that we have the presidency, let’s not lose our common sense completely and start falling for imaginative rationalizations of good old fashioned patronage. Politicians have important friends who need to be rewarded for services rendered. Better an ambassador than a judge or a US Attorney or the head of FEMA.
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
And then, when the well-connected know-nothing gets in to talk to the president he can spout all sorts of nonsense since he doesn’t know anything important about the country in question or foreign policy. That said, even career FSOs (several are my friends!) often know shamefully little about the countries they work in because the State department is so worried about their going native that they are moved before they could build up any real experience, you’re rarely (though not never) sent to a country you already know much about, and getting to know the locals well is fairly heavily discouraged. It seems a dumb plan to me.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Another reason, at least as it pertains to the ambassadorship to Paris, is that ambassadors were expected to fund a healthy portion of their own expense accounts back in the day, so you needed someone who had the money and desired that lifestyle to do it.
Or so I’ve heard.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:12 pm
It’s better for the host country, but is it better for the country sending the ambassador? Why should the U.S. have a system where countries like Mauritius and the Bahamas get disproportionate access to the President? The exact same argument could be made for why it’s good that lobbying firms seek out personal friends of the President and that these firms thereby have disproportionate access. All else being equal, sure, I’d like better U.S.-Bahamas relations, as well as better U.S.-copper industry relations or whatever, but all else is not equal, for increasing one lobby’s share access to the executive decreases everyone else’s share of access.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:13 pm
Thus, it’s arguably better for the host country to have a political appointee than a career FSO.
It depends on the caliber of the political appointee. Since 1977, we’ve placed significant retired Senators (ie. former Majority Leaders). GWB chose to place a former business partner.
Given what a crappy businessman the President was, and that turkeys of a feather fly together, I’m guessing that the Japanese may have been less than impressed.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:14 pm
Crap, I failed to specify: The Ambassador to Japan
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:18 pm
Another reason, at least as it pertains to the ambassadorship to Paris, is that ambassadors were expected to fund a healthy portion of their own expense accounts back in the day, so you needed someone who had the money and desired that lifestyle to do it.
That’s what I’d always heard. The Duke in The Charterhouse of Parma makes a point of accepting a nominal salary and promising to spend X ducats (or whatever) annually in parties and entertainments.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:27 pm
What DTM said. With, say, the UK, the high-level contacts are president to prime minister and secretary of state to foreign minister. What’s left for the ambassador, except to attend diplomatic parties? Posting a good FSO to London would be a waste.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:37 pm
France and Brazil have been well-served by using their professional diplomats in all ambassadorships, even the most important/prestigious (starting with Washington), so I don’t see why we couldn’t do the same.
December 3rd, 2008 at 9:48 pm
With, say, the UK, the high-level contacts are president to prime minister and secretary of state to foreign minister. What’s left for the ambassador, except to attend diplomatic parties? Posting a good FSO to London would be a waste.
That’s a bullshit rationalisation. The UK’s ambassador in Washington is invariably a high-ranking diplomat. The current one, Sir Nigel Sheinwald, has a 30-year resume. Clearly, the UK thinks it’s a good thing to have one of its top foreign service officers in the DC embassy, while Democratic and Republican presidents have decided that the London embassy should be headed by a non-diplomat. (Clinton was better than either Bush, but not great.) That’s not to say that the totalitarian monstrosity on Grosvenor Square isn’t run, de facto, by a senior FSO, but the ambassadorship is reserved as a ceremonial position.
The story related to Matt is equally bullshit. Absent a system that hands out gongs and knighthoods and peerages to political supporters (or to high-ranking diplomats, for that matter), the American president hands out plum ambassadorships in pleasant capitals.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 pm
I think I care less about corruption than results. If there were even a single Bush appointee who did an excellent job of carrying out a good policy, I wouldn’t care whose brother they were or how much they contributed.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:24 pm
Politicians have important friends who need to be rewarded for services rendered. Better an ambassador than a judge or a US Attorney or the head of FEMA.
Amen.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:33 pm
Why shouldn’t the ambassador to a given country have some expertise in that country? It seems like common sense to me that the ambassador to Japan should have some prior experience with Japan, rather than being some political crony who’s never been out of the country before and knows absolutely nothing about foreign affairs.
December 3rd, 2008 at 11:50 pm
Rich Says:
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:09 pm
All I have ever aspired to be is an ambassador…or a philanthropist. Then again, maybe you have to be the latter to become the former.
—-
No, you can do it the other way around if you are sufficiently skilled at converting access to power into liquid funds.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:29 am
The ambassador is a personal representative of the President. Its probably a good idea to use personal friends in that role.
Other countries have moved away from doing that because they’ve also moved away from monarchial systems of government.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:33 am
The flip side is that a powerful figure appointed to be Ambassador somewhere may have his or her own idea about foreign policy, and may be hard for the President to control. An excellent example is Joe Kennedy, our UK Ambassador in the run-up to World War II. He was an appeaser and a believer in the power of Nazi Germany, and didn’t fit well with FDRs beliefs or policies. No foreign service officer would have ever presented such a problem.
December 4th, 2008 at 12:44 am
the reason given to matt doesn’t make any sense, when you think about it.
Why would a president make senior appointments on the basis of what’s in the interests of the other country?
Sure, these countries might all want to have U.S. Ambassadors with good access to the president, but really, why would the president particularly care what they want? In a world where the president didn’t have a lot of favors to repay, you’d see an effort to get the most qualified and effective people into these jobs, and I bet most of them would end up being career diplomats.
December 4th, 2008 at 2:18 am
The reason given to matt doesn’t make any sense, when you think about it.
Why would a president make senior appointments on the basis of what’s in the interests of the other country?
Good question, jmo. To rephrase the “reason” in less diplomatically correct terms, the goal is not to actually serve the interests of the other country but to give them the impression that their interests will be better served by a crony ambassador with a presumed close friendship with and direct line to the President.
Ambassadors to friendly countries don’t do much and are not particularly useful. Think of them as ornaments for personal diplomacy. They may as well be prestigious ornaments to stroke the vanity of their hosts, to let them start the conversation with “Well, Ambassador, as I am sure you will discuss this matter with your friend, President Bush, during your next visit in Washington, I would like to make you aware of blah, blah, blah …”. Vanity is the main fuel of one-to-one diplomacy. Amazing what you can get out of it. The illusions of closeness with the important and the powerful is a highly sought reward, the kind a crony ambassador can supply by the ton.
December 4th, 2008 at 2:38 am
How is this “corruption”? It’s not “corruption” to appoint a supporter, oh, Secretary of State, but it’s corrupt to appoint a less important supporter to be Ambassador to France?
December 4th, 2008 at 2:38 am
The illusions of closeness with the important and the powerful is a highly sought reward, the kind a crony ambassador can supply by the ton.
Oh yes, it’s all just a brilliant way to get trick the Bahamas into supporting our policies. How clever.
In the past couple weeks, it’s become apparent to me that virtually no one on this blog, least of all the host, has any idea what they’re talking about. But why am I realizing this only now? Have things gone downhill or am I just getting more cynical in my old age?
December 4th, 2008 at 3:08 am
Ambassadors to friendly countries don’t do much and are not particularly useful.
But the reciprocal examples — the ambassadors of France, the UK, Germany, et al. to the US — suggest otherwise. Why would friendly country send their most senior diplomats to DC? Now, you can argue that in those cases it has political significance and also rewards seniority in the diplomatic service of that country, but you can’t argue that they’re not expected to “do much”.
(Here’s a list of all the ambassadors in DC: the only major friendly nations that don’t send a career diplomat are Canada, because Stephen fucking Harper thinks he’s a Republican president, and Israel, where the ambassador is the head of the Jewish Agency, the “Jews of the world, come to Israel!” organisation.)
So, if you’re making the case that there’s some kind of exceptionalist principle that allows the US to send, for instance, car dealers and horse breeders to the Court of St James rather than diplomats– please, spell out why.
December 4th, 2008 at 3:45 am
Following the wise words of pseaud. inc. – It continues to amaze me that Americans can rationalize this kind of shit. Virtually every other country, including highly authoritarian/monarchial ones like Russia, consider an Ambassadorship an important role, held by a professional. The US is the exception, and hands major embassies over to ignorant businessmen who can’t speak the local language but have made large contributions to the President’s election campaign. It’s insulting to the host countries, and frequently leads to little slips and stupidities which get p5 coverage in host countries and no coverage in the US.
I think many of the arguments above are smart and would be acceptable as arguments for why this arrangement is not quite as bad as it appears to a rational, thinking person. But let’s not pretend it is better than doing diplomacy properly
December 4th, 2008 at 5:54 am
Should point out that this argument:
It is good to have a friend of the President rather than a FSO as your US ambassador, because he will have better access to the President;
and this one:
It doesn’t matter who gets appointed as US ambassador because diplomacy is all done directly now anyway;
are in direct contradiction.
There was a career US ambassador to the UK recently – Raymond Seitz. He was really rather good at his job, a cut above the others. It was noticed.
December 4th, 2008 at 7:30 am
It is true that better access to the executive is a plus in an ambassador, but you don’t need to be a patronage appointee to have such access. I worked briefly at the Canadian embassy in Beijing, where the ambassador at the time was a career foreign service officer, but had served for a while in the privy council office (basically the government agency that is directly under the Prime Minister), working closely with the Prime Minister. His contacts were considered a boon to the office and to the Canadian-Chinese relationship, without sacrificing foreign policy expertise.
To be fair, there are also patronage appointments who have real expertise. The current U.S. ambassador to China, Clark Randt, is an old frat buddy of Bush’s but he’s also a real expert on China–used to head the China practice of a global law firm. The real reason why the ambassadors to countries like the UK are often useless is that, although the UK is an important ally, our relationship with them is primarily military and commercial. Patronage appointees are often big businessmen, which gives them good experience on the commercial side, and the military stuff is done by military attaches anyway. With countries like China or Russia, where there’s actually a lot of diplomacy going on, the ambassadors are either career people or patronage appointees with real experience, like Randt.
December 4th, 2008 at 8:24 am
Ridiculous. Apply the same theory to some other organization to see why: it’s best to have the CFO (deputy secretary) be a friend of the CEO (secretary) because then the CEO (secretary) will be more likely to talk to him.
December 4th, 2008 at 10:00 am
The current US Ambassador to Germany is a Bush patronage appointment. I didn’t like him much when I met him, but he has (I think on his own initiative or on the advice of his staff) gotten behind a major push to connect with Muslim groups and organizations in Germany. This isn’t easy, but it’s a good thing to do, and I think that it is reasonably well done.
Pamela Herriman (in Paris under Clinton) was a good example of the value of a well-considered patronage appointment, and I think that Mondale was also well regarded both in Japan and among people on the US side dealing with the relationship.
Like everything, you win some and you lose some with political appointments. Running an embassy under a disengaged Ambassador is also not a bad experience for a Deputy Chief of Mission who can expect to be promoted to Ambassador next. Clouds, silver lining, etc.
December 4th, 2008 at 1:41 pm
There was a career US ambassador to the UK recently – Raymond Seitz. He was really rather good at his job, a cut above the others. It was noticed.
Yep: first in modern history. Good choice by Daddy Bush. Clinton’s choices weren’t bad — William Crowe, former head of the Joint Chiefs, and Philip Lader — but they weren’t great.
jhdk: all points well taken, but you can also argue that there’s a certain amount of value that can be gained from Obama breaking from precedent and appointing people with expertise to London/Paris/Berlin/Tokyo — not just to those countries, but also as a booster shot for the Foreign Service, which has become used to rewarding senior career ambassadors with the mission in Botswana.
December 4th, 2008 at 2:42 pm
The biggest problem with patronage appointments lies with the judgment of the appointer:
I was a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in the late eighties. The American ambassador, appointed by Reagan, was dumb as a stick. Really; the Peace Corps director had to follow him around so he wouldn’t embarrass himself. He didn’t know anybody’s name, any local customs, etc. He was also a right wing creationist, which is beside the point, except I suspect that was one reason he got the job.
When we elect idiots, they appoint morons.
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