Wednesday 29 July 2009
Ambassadorships for Sale ☀
The modern American presidential campaign is a hungry beast. In the 2008 campaign, the three principal candidates raised in excess of $1.1 billion, and spending overall essentially doubled as compared with the 2004 campaign, itself a record-setter. And for generations, one unseemly aspect of fundraising has been the de facto sale of ambassadorships. As the Los Angeles Times noted in a recent editorial, the United States is the only major country that regularly hands out choice ambassadorships as a favor for campaign funding bundlers. The process cheapens our diplomatic relations and sends a bad message to the states to which these ambassadors are sent. And it’s getting cruder and greedier. A cynic studying the latest batch of nominees might conclude that the price of an ambassadorship has soared from roughly $200,000 under the Rovian regime to $500,000 under Rahm Emanuel.
