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.
