Patronage, Obama Style
Morgen on July 7, 2009 at 3:47 pm
The Washington Times ran a story today on a topic I’ve been digging into myself – the striking number of political appointments granted by the Obama Administration to the most prodigious fundraisers of the Obama campaign. These top fundraisers are known as “bundlers”. Since campaign finance laws restrict any one individual from donating more than $2400 to a single candidate, these bundlers achieve prominence within a campaign by soliciting for and then – you guessed it – bundling up individual donations received via their extended network of friends, family, business contacts, etc. While exact figures are not available, the top bundlers within the Obama campaign each delivered in excess of $1 million in campaign contributions, and there were nearly 50 bundlers who were responsible for at least $500K in donations.
As the Times notes, it’s somewhat of a Washington tradition for an incoming President to appoint choice ambassadorships to key political donors and allies. While this may be the case, for a President who declared a “new era” of accountability, and who championed ethics reform while in the Senate, a look at the appointments made to date reveals what I think is a surprising level of cronyism on the part of this Administration. And notably, many of these appointments extend outside the relatively ceremonial realm of diplomatic posts.
Let’s first run through the appointments highlighted by the Washington Times article:
| Funds Raised | Appointment | |
|---|---|---|
| John Roos | $500K+ | Ambassador - Japan |
| Charles Rivkin | $500K+ | Ambassador - France |
| Bruce Oreck | $500K+ | Ambassador - Finland |
| Louis Susman | $200K-$500K | Ambassador - United Kingdom |
| Vinai Thummalapally | $100K-$200K | Ambassador - Belize |
| Laurie Fulton | $100K-$200K | Ambassador - Denmark |
Perhaps budget cuts have impacted the research team at the Times because I was able to find several other ambassadorship appointments that they apparently missed:
| Funds Raised | Appointment | |
|---|---|---|
| Nicole Avant | $500K+ | Ambassador - Bahamas |
| Matthew Barzun | $500K+ | Ambassador - Sweden |
| Don Beyer | $500K+ | Ambassador - Switzerland |
| William C. Eacho III | $500K+ | Ambassador - Austria Kingdom |
| Donald Gips | $500K+ | Ambassador - South Africa |
| Howard Gutman | $500K+ | Ambassador - Belgium |
| David Jacobson (added 7/8) | $50K-$100K | Ambassador - Canada |
| Samuel Kaplan (added 7/22) | $100K-$200K | Ambassador - Morocco |
Add these up and that’s 12 13 appointments (12!) to key diplomatic positions that were awarded directly to top Obama fundraisers. And that’s within only the first 6 months of the Administration. I expect there will be more to come, which is why I had initially held off on posting this.
But that’s not all. The tables above represent only the ambassadorship appointments. Take a look at some of the other Administration positions awarded within the ranks of the campaign bundlers:
| Funds Raised | Appointment | |
|---|---|---|
| Jeff Bleich | $500K+ | Special Counsel to the President |
| Julius Genachowski | $500K+ | Chairman, FCC |
| Scott Harris | $500K+ | General Counsel, Dept. of Energy |
| Karl Mason | $500K+ | Deputy Asst. Attorney General |
| Thomas Perrelli | $500K+ | Associate Attorney General |
| Francisco Sanchez | $500K+ | Under-Secy. for International Trade |
| Alan Solomont | $500K+ | Chairman, Corp. for Nat'l & Community Service |
| Tony West | $500K+ | Asst. Attorney General, Civil Div. |
| Norman Eisen (added 7/15) | $200K-$500K | Special Assistant to the President |
Yes, the Chairman of the FCC. Three positions within the Attorney General’s office. A key legal advisory role within the White House itself. And the Corporation for National & Community Service has made headlines over the past month for the firing of Inspector General Gerald Walpin.
By my calculation, nearly half of the top level of Obama campaign bundlers have been rewarded with some sort of role within the government. Half! What will it take for others within the media to further investigate and question the Administration about this? Frankly, I thought even the Washington Times was overly generous in their characterization of the Administration’s behavior with these types of appointments.
I’ll wrap this up by quoting a sub-section of President Obama’s Executive Order on Ethics Commitments for Executive Branch Personnel:
Employment Qualification Commitment. I agree that any hiring or other employment decisions I make will be based on the candidate’s qualifications, competence, and experience.
Apparently when you are the boss you aren’t required to follow your own rules.
Update: John pointed me to another key Obama fundraiser who has been awarded a position of sorts within the Administration. Robert Wolf is the Chairman/CEO of investment bank UBS and given his influence on Wall Street may in fact be the largest bundler of them all. Significantly, Wolf’s firm seems to be mired in several tax-related scandals; and they were also a key counter-party recipient of funds from AIG, courtesy of the U.S. tax payer. However, apparently all this was not enough to deter the President from naming Wolf to his Economic Advisory Council.
Update 2: I will continue to update the tables above as other appointments are made or brought to my attention (e.g. I just saw that I missed an ambassadorship appointment to Canada because the individual was responsible for only $50-100K in bundled donations).
Category: Politics |
As much as I hate Obama, this doesn’t seem like a big deal to me. Of course he’s going to appoint his friends and people with similar political beliefs to those kinds of jobs, and those are the kinds of people who would raise a lot of money for Obama’s campaign. Yes, that executive order proves he’s a hypocrite, but it’s hard to get worked up about that kind of thing these days. I assume everything any politician says is a lie anyway.
The real problem to me, is why do we have those positions in the first place? What does the US ambassador to Belize do all day? Why do we have an Under Secretary for International Trade? Why do we have a Corporation for National and Community Service at all, let alone a chairman for it? As long as positions like those exist, they’re always going to go to the well-connected or big fundraisers. We need to get rid of all that waste if we want to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.
July 7, 2009 @ 7:56 pmChris, if you couldn’t tell I wasn’t really able to muster much outrage over this either. But the fact that we can’t says something pretty significant about our expectations for ethical behavior within the federal government.
And think about the inanity of the campaign finance laws themselves. It’s illegal for an individual to donate $2401 to a candidate for President. But then somehow it’s not only allowed but expected that the winning candidate will hand over choice ambassadorship posts to his cronies who peddled their influence to bundle together donations totaling $1 million or more.
In the private sector or even at most any level within the government, if you hand out jobs or other favors to people who give you money you are up on a bribery or corruption charge. When it’s the White House doing this? Yawn…
July 7, 2009 @ 8:51 pmI agree, it is bad on it’s face, and it probably should seem more outrageous than it does. But my main point was that this isn’t really an Obama-specific problem. Do we have similar tables for George W Bush, Clinton, or George HW Bush? I don’t, but I expect they’d look pretty similar to Obama’s. We can only speculate what will happen with the next president, but it’s probably safe to assume we’ll get more of the same (regardless of Rebuplican vs Democrat). I think it would have been better to title the post “Patronage, Modern American Style.”
It would be better to have a system where the president doesn’t have so much power in the first place. Then, when we happen to elect a lying sleazebag who breaks even his own rules, not much harm is done.
July 7, 2009 @ 10:48 pmOk, I did the math. If Ron Paul had won the election, based on how much I donated to him and bundled for him (probably 1000 dollars or so) I’d be an Ambassador right now. DAMN IT OBAMA, I HATE YOU!
July 8, 2009 @ 12:09 amLooked at another way, it would seem likely that senior people with views allied to Obama’s (i.e. the pool from which he will want to make his appointments) will have wanted, because of their similar views, to have done all they can, used all their influence to help the Obama campaign. So it’s hardly surprising that these people ended up ‘bundling’ so much.
The whole thing does smell a bit, though, I’ll agree.
Chris – I think you guys pretty much have to have an ambassador to everywhere, because you are the top country in the world. A prestige thing, if you like. Also, you may not be able to think of much that America wants to talk to the Belizeans (?) about, but I’m sure they can think of enough they want to talk to the Americans about to keep your guy occupied at least half of the time. Cushy number, though, no doubt.
July 8, 2009 @ 1:48 am[...] Obama bundlers who bought themselves positions within the Obama foreign service, but as Morgen at Verum Serum notes, that only tells part of the story. In fact, Obama has extended patronage across the entire [...]
July 8, 2009 @ 8:58 amI think you are missing Art Rooney from your list, made ambassador to Ireland or Scotland can’t remember which. He campaigned HEAVILY for Obama in SWPA and was rewarded in return.
July 8, 2009 @ 9:42 amThanks TrolleyRider. I don’t see Rooney on the list I have but I will look it up elsewhere and add him to the list once confirmed.
July 8, 2009 @ 10:22 amThis blog is excellent, wish I’d known about it sooner. You seem to hit on a lot of things going unmentioned elsewhere. I’m sure to become an avid fan. Thanks!
July 8, 2009 @ 10:27 amThe key issue to this lies in the word “Change”, we heard it too many times, repeatedly, over and over. He sold himself as the Candidate of Change and many bought it.
July 8, 2009 @ 10:33 am[...] that an idiot like that ever became a professor." – Harry Potter Click Here for More Broken News Verum Serum looks at how far your money can go, if you donate it to Obama. When it comes to giving out Ambassadorships, Obama is for Change™, but he prefers large, [...]
July 8, 2009 @ 12:35 pmI’m not outraged that he did this at all since I expect it from all Federal politicians and especially any Chicago related politicos (I grew up there for almost 30 years, I know how terribly crooked politics run there).
Though it is good to see that the man I told everyone was a liar and incapable of handling this job keeps racking up the evidence against him.
When you run your campaign on the premise that you are going to excise precisely this kinda thing and go balls out doing the opposite of what you claimed you would do, you pretty much fly the middle finger at anyone who believed your snake oil pitch.
Everyone who voted for this joke of a president is getting what we all knew they would get: an inexperienced, incapable liar for a POTUS.
July 8, 2009 @ 4:23 pm[...] How Obama rewards his most prolific fundraisers with crony appointments Story from the Washington Times. (H/T Verum Serum) [...]
July 9, 2009 @ 1:03 am[...] limited to the State Department, either. Obama has handed out plum appointments to about half of his above-average bundlers to areas like the FCC and the Department of Justice, where Congress just made a fetish of [...]
July 10, 2009 @ 8:54 am