Checkbook Diplomacy - Part Three
The system resists fixing
BY Stephanie Mencimer | August 13, 2008
Richard Nixon’s personal lawyer went to prison for soliciting money from major donors who wanted ambassadorships, and when Jimmy Carter showed up at the White House in the wake of Nixon’s scandal-scarred presidency he was determined to clean things up.
He promised to appoint only qualified officials as ambassadors, primarily from the ranks of foreign-service officers, and he largely kept his promise, setting up a committee to screen candidates and keeping the number of political appointees lower than it had been for at least a decade — drawing down the curtain on one of the least subtle acts in the quadrennial drama known as “the buying of the president.” Nixon’s fundraisers had routinely gotten $100,000 or more for ambassadorships.
But the curtain didn’t stay down long. Carter’s was a one-term presidency, and upon taking office Ronald Reagan promptly abolished the screening committee and set to work filling foreign posts with political donors and loyalists. Later efforts to hold down the number of political appointees foundered, and there’s a reason for it: Patronage is systemic in both parties, and election campaigns get ever more expensive — it’s widely expected that the candidates will spend more than a $1 billion in the current campaign. The donations, the appointments, the embarrassments, the scandals are a chronic part of the American political system.
Melvin Sembler, a prolific Republican fundraiser, tells a story — he lived it as well — that drives home what bakes this mess into the system:
Senator Paul Sarbanes: “If it’s going to be a bidding war [for ambassadorial nominations] at least we should put it up for public bid so the money goes to the U.S. Treasury.” (Office of Senator Paul Sarbanes)Sembler, whose company develops shopping malls in the southeast, is a longtime friend of both Presidents Bush. Before the senior Bush appointed him ambassador to Australia in 1989, he had donated $127,000 to the Republican Party. That year, Senator Paul Sarbanes decided to press his objections to the appointment of fundraisers as ambassadors. Sarbanes, then a Democratic senator from Maryland, had been troubled by the number of large donors the senior Bush had named to foreign posts. In the first months of the president’s term, at least seven members of “Team 100,” Bush’s cadre of contributors who gave or raised $100,000 or more for his 1988 campaign, had landed ambassadorial nominations. Sarbanes said at the time, “If it’s going to be a bidding war [for ambassadorial nominations] at least we should put it up for public bid so the money goes to the U.S. Treasury.”
Among the nominees Sarbanes gave particular scrutiny because of lack of qualifications was Sembler. The dustup started after congressional staffers discovered that Sembler and his friend Joseph Zappala, another Florida developer and GOP donor who was appointed ambassador to Spain, had submitted virtually identical answers to the Senate questionnaire probing their qualifications. Sembler wrote, “I have been known as a coalition builder able to organize my colleagues and peers to action in support of worthy civic, charitable, and political causes.” Zappala said, “I am known as a coalition builder. I am able to organize my colleagues and peers to action in support of worthwhile civic, charitable and political causes.”
Both men were eventually confirmed, but the whole experience still sticks in Sembler’s craw. He never won Sarbanes over but was confirmed after he persuaded some Democratic fundraisers to appeal to other Democratic senators and to explain to them the consequences of continuing this intense scrutiny of ambassadorial nominees: The Democrats, Sembler cautioned, would lose many of their best people, who would be reluctant to raise money knowing that they could be subjected to similar scrutiny when Republicans gained control of Congress. “Us fundraisers, we understand it among ourselves,” Sembler said in an interview. “Because somebody’s got to go raise the money.”
Attempts to tamp down on the number of political appointees in the wake of the Nixon spectacle include a 1976 effort by Senator Charles Mathias Jr., Republican from Maryland, who tried to cap the number at 25 percent of all appointments; that same year, then-Representative Al Gore tried to cut that number to 15 percent, but neither effort succeeded. “Both parties need to agree to lower the numbers,” says John Naland, president of the American Foreign Service Association. “The law doesn’t get that far.”