Ambassadors: Do patronage picks matter?

Domenico Montanaro Political Researcher

WASHINGTON - American presidents rewarding top campaign fundraisers with plum ambassadorships has long been common practice for both Democrats and Republicans alike.

But President Obama, who has vowed to “change the ways of Washington,” has not only continued this tradition of his predecessors, he has outpaced them.

So far, 57% of Obama’s picks for ambassador positions — 34 of 60 — have been political appointees, or people not considered career Foreign Service, according to the American Foreign Service Association. Fourteen of those, or 23 percent, are bundlers. Bundlers are individuals who raise large amounts of money for a candidate by "bundling" together smaller contributions from others. For 2008, anyone who a raised more than $50,000 for candidate Obama are considered bundlers.

In the past 50 years, the average percentage for political appointees has been about 30 percent, according to AFSA. The practice increased under George W. Bush — 36 percent of his picks were political. (Jimmy Carter appointed the least at 24 percent.)

Because many of the political appointments are made early on in a presidency, Obama’s percentages will likely decrease; as more ambassadors are named, more are likely to be career Foreign Service. 

At a January news conference, then-President-elect Obama did acknowledge that "there probably will be some" ambassadors chosen who were top donors. “It would be disingenuous for me to suggest that there are not going to be some excellent public servants but who haven’t come through the ranks of the civil service,” he said.

The White House is focused on the 30-percent target, but not necessarily reducing the number. Groups like AFSA have advocated for the average to be lowered to 10 percent.

Some foreign policy observers say that if Obama is not going to change the practice, then perhaps some of these posts should be eliminated all together. They argue the positions are outdated, a waste of money, and have long gone to political appointees who may have little prior knowledge of the region to which they are assigned.

Others aren’t convinced. They say removing these posts would reduce access to key leaders, be seen as a “slap in the face” to other countries, and, they stress, one never knows when — or where — a crisis could happen.

We’ve come a long way
The 14 bundlers Obama has picked so far have been appointed to some pretty cushy locales, including Austria, the Bahamas, Belgium, Belize, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Japan, Morocco, South Africa, Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Sweden, and the U.K./Northern Ireland.

Most of these places the U.S. hasn't struggled with of late.

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We’ve come a long way since John Adams. Adams, who became the burgeoning republic’s second president, was a high-profile ambassador to places like France, England and Holland. But that was at a time when it took more than a month to get across the Atlantic (nor were there any modern communication conveniences, like telephones, much less the Internet.

So why not just get rid of these posts and save American taxpayers the money they front for pricey residences in these places?

As David Rothkopf, a former Clinton deputy under secretary of commerce for international trade policy, wrote for Foreign Policy last month: “If a job is meaningless enough to be entrusted to someone who is unqualified to do it, do we really need to fill that post?”

Rothkopf is the author of “Superclass: The Global Power Elite and the World They are Making.” In an interview with NBC, he gave a two-pronged argument for nixing these posts: First, if you can appoint someone who has no experience for the job, you can’t really value that job —someone else, who knows what’s going on, is doing the real work of the embassy; and Second, the job is outdated, created hundreds of years ago to bring sealed missives from one country to another.

He calls these ambassadors largely ceremonial and that the senior government officials in those countries “don’t want to deal with an ambassador,” Rothkopf said. They’d rather deal with their counterpart in the American government.

‘Yes, they matter’ — still
Barbara Bodine — a lecturer at Princeton’s Wilson School and former ambassador to Yemen, who has argued it’s time to stop selling ambassadorships — has said flatly of these bundler posts that “Yes, they matter.”

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“Our relationships with these countries — the British, the French, the Chinese, the Japanese — are important,” she said, adding later, “You need ambassadors — modern communication notwithstanding.”

In fact, she argued, because of technological advances, “You need an ambassador even more.”

She said that during her time in Yemen, for example, her Yemeni counterpart would often have already checked out American broadcast news and read the New York Times and Washington Post by 7 a.m. Because of that, she argued, countries need a qualified ambassador who can get face time to explain first-hand a country’s perspective.

“If you remove the ambassadors,” she said, “that is a political slap in the face. That’s what you do to a country you don’t like. You need someone there who can speak to them.”

She also stressed that though a country may seem “safe” enough for a bundler, you never know where a crisis could strike.

“If you have somebody who doesn’t understand diplomacy as practiced,” Bodine said, “you can make missteps you don’t need.”

For example, in 1989, she was assigned to Kuwait, a country seen then as a “quiet, resort place where nothing happened,” Bodine said. There was talk in 1989 that a “Texas banker buddy” of George H.W. Bush would be assigned to the country. Bodine said “luckily” that didn’t happen, because on Aug. 2nd, 1991, “all hell broke loose.”

That was the day Iraq invaded and occupied Kuwait, which led to the U.S.’s involvement in the first Gulf War. Bodine said a career ambassador was in charge then and knew what to do without missing a beat.

“You never know where the stuff is going to hit the fan,” she said, adding, “The complexity of problems is not a job for amateurs — even a talented amateur.”

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But Steven Pifer, a former ambassador to Ukraine, said there can be an advantage to having an appointee who is close to the president, because one can often “pick up the phone and call” directly.

He cites Henry Catto, who was friendly with George H.W. Bush, and served as Bush’s ambassador to the United Kingdom.

“The British appreciated that he could pick up the phone once or twice a year” and call President Bush. “They appreciated he could go to the top.”

Pifer, though, acknowledged that others “have not been very popular.” And Catto had previous diplomatic experience, though he was not a career Foreign Service Officer. He had gotten his start in Texas Republican Party politics.

Bodine, though, downplayed the notion of a political appointee’s access to the president.

“The idea that they have a direct line to the president” doesn’t hold up, she said, because “the president doesn’t run foreign policy [on a local level] on a day-to-day basis.”

Both Bodine and Pifer argued that not having an ambassador reduces access and would also have a negative impact on morale among Foreign Service Officers, who have spent decades hoping to rise to an ambassadorship. Getting rid of a post, they said, only further reduces their chances.

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