By BRIAN KNOWLTON Published: December 26, 2013 New York Times excerpt:
WASHINGTON — Charles H. Rivkin has had quite a ride, going in four years from an Obama fund-raiser and Hollywood media honcho to ambassador to Paris and now a nominee as an assistant secretary of state.
In almost no other democracy could this happen. Diplomats are nearly
always career professionals, products of intense competition and
intensive training, with successive foreign rotations for posts deemed
to require in-depth knowledge of a region, culture and language — not
just political connections.
And so the question arises: Can a political appointee’s real-world
experience, management savvy, influential contacts and even sheer star
power compensate for a dearth of hard-earned familiarity with a host
country’s realities?
There are success stories and embarrassments on both sides.
Consider Mr. Rivkin: While he was a leading fund-raiser for Mr. Obama as
well as John Kerry, who has been his boss at the State Department, he
is hardly without qualifications. He studied international relations at
Yale and business at Harvard, ran a major company and speaks fluent
French. In Paris, he drew high marks for a creative use of social media,
vigorous minority outreach and promotion of American green technology. A
State Department inspector general called him a “visionary non-career
ambassador.”
Plenty of Mr. Obama’s political picks have done well.
But others have been harshly criticized as ill-prepared or
temperamentally unsuited for the work. Inspector general reports
described one such ambassadorial selection, an Obama fund-raiser, as
“aggressive, bullying, hostile and intimidating”; another, a former
Obama confidant, was ranked last for interpersonal relations among 80
mission chiefs surveyed recently, no great distinction for a diplomat.
Both have resigned.
The White House insists that its recruitment practices comport with
those of past administrations, and that it seeks a diverse selection of
highly qualified people. “Being a donor does not get you a job in this
administration, nor does it preclude you from getting one,” said Eric
Schultz, a White House spokesman.
Barack Obama's new ambassador to China - Merits or Midterms?
Yet, ever since President Jimmy Carter, who limited political
ambassadorships to about 25 percent of the total, their number has
grown. It now stands at 36 percent, according to the American Foreign
Service Association. And the number of senior State Department jobs
going to non-career diplomats has risen sharply. (Mr. Rivkin would be
the first non-career country ambassador to lead the Economic and
Business Bureau.)
Barack Obama has never acted in the best interest of the country as a whole. Cronyism combined with the
'collectivism' of the new left are just current incarnations of history's failed ideologies and only repackage repression.
Kentucky Democratic Senate candidate Alison Lundergan Grimes refused multiple times to say whether she voted for President Obama during a Thursday interview with the Louisville Courier-Journal editorial board.
