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**JULY 9, 2021**

Kuttner on TAP

Biden and His Ambassadors-Not Quite Such a Boy Scout

****

On Wednesday, I wrote an effusive On TAP post

congratulating Joe Biden for breaking with recent tradition and
appointing mostly eminent experts or career Foreign Service people as
his ambassadors. The post was mostly right, but mostly is not good
enough.

One of my examples was Biden's recent appointment of the president of
the University of Pennsylvania, Amy Gutmann, to be his ambassador to
Germany. She is a respected political philosopher, as I wrote, and the
daughter of Holocaust survivors. True.

What I did not write, and should have known enough to check out, was
that Gutmann provided Biden with a lucrative gig at Penn called the
Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor. It paid Biden more
than $900,000 over less than three academic years

beginning in 2017, for not very well-defined duties. According to The
Daily Pennsylvanian
,
during these three academic years Biden made fewer than a dozen public
appearances.

When Michael Dukakis, after his presidential run, took a post at
Northeastern University, he had a normal teaching load like the other
professors. An unkind characterization of Biden's gig at Penn would be
a no-show job. An unkind description of Gutmann as ambassador to Germany
would be patronage payback.

That said, Biden is still doing a lot better on this front than most
presidents.

Three takeaways from this story:

Number one: Biden doesn't walk on water (and I never said that he
did).

Number two: Do all your reporting

**before** you post an item, not after.

Number three: When you are allegedly on vacation with your family, take
the whole week off.

Apologies to readers, good luck to Gutmann, and let's hope this is the
last payback appointment of a Biden ambassador.

~ ROBERT KUTTNER

Follow Robert Kuttner on Twitter

Robert Kuttner's latest book is
The Stakes: 2020 and the Survival of American Democracy
.

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