It’s not exactly a dirty little secret, as many folks know this already … but ambassadorial appointments are more likely than not going to individuals who’ve helped presidents get elected or re-elected.
You can be sure as shootin’ on this one: President Obama’s appointment of Jane Hartley as the next U.S. ambassador to France is going to bring out the critics who’ll say they’re simply “shocked, shocked!” that the president would pick someone who so darn political.
That’s been the custom since the beginning of the Republic.
Hartley is a well-known “bundler” who helped the president win re-election in 2012. Bundlers are those who go around collecting large sums of money from various interest groups and then contribute that money to whatever political cause or candidate they support.
I have no clue whether she’s an expert on France or whether she even knows anything about The Bastille. She is yet another in a long line of ambassadorial appointments that fall into this category of so-called “political hack.”
The vast majority of the complaints will come, of course, from Republicans.
I shouldn’t have to remind our friends in the GOP — but I will anyway — that presidents from their party do the same thing. I’ll cite one example quite close to home.
The late Teel Bivins of Amarillo served in the Texas Senate for 15 years before President George W. Bush tapped him to become U.S. ambassador to Sweden. Did Bivins get the nod because he was an expert on preparing pickled herring? Oh no. He got it because of his own campaign grunt work raising money and speaking on behalf of President Bush during the 2000 campaign.
One of Bivins’s top Senate aides actually told me at the time the president was rewarding the senator for “15 years of service to Texas.” Sure thing.
Well, Teel Bivins’s service to Texas wasn’t the reason he was sent to Stockholm. Hartley’s service won’t matter when Hartley jets off — once the U.S. Senate confirms her — to take her post in Paris. It hardly ever is the case whenever presidents make these appointments.
These folks are rewarded for their “service,” all right. It’s all politics.