The allegations do not focus on Garcetti personally, but on his former colleague Rick Jacobs. It was nonetheless considered serious enough that Democratic Senator Mazie Hirono told reporters earlier in the day that she decided to vote against the nomination after providing “reliable information given to me in confidence”.
Seligman was more direct, saying Garcetti was unfit for the ambassadorial job and criticizing the Biden administration and most Democratic lawmakers for ignoring the allegations.
“Unfortunately the White House has put undue pressure on Democrats to vote for Eric Garcetti, because he has been a very, very loyal figure to President Biden,” Seligman said in an interview with CNN. And she feels “afraid of the people who will be around her.”
However, the Democratic leadership expressed full confidence in the man seen as close to President Biden.
Typically, large and important countries have political appointees as ambassadors, who have the ear and often a direct line to the president. JK galbraith was a Kennedy confidant, and the story goes that he often bypassed his imaginary boss, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, to go directly to the president, once writing to him trying to communicate via telephone. dry bread “Was like trying to commit adultery through a mattress.” Chester Bowles, Kenneth Keating and Daniel Moynihan, all political appointees who followed Galbraith to New Delhi, were heavyweights in their own right, having served in the House and Senate.
However, in the 1980s, Washington sent a series of career Foreign Service Officers (FSOs) to serve as ambassadors in New Delhi. Although some of them were distinguished careerists – Pickering and Wisner among them – it was not until Bill Clinton, who was preparing for his trip to India in 2000, sent former Ohio governor Richard Celeste, that political appointments again became the norm. Gone. Since then, with the exception of Nancy Powell in 2012–2014, all US ambassadors to New Delhi have been political appointees: Robert Blackwill, David Mulford, Timothy Roemer, Richard Verma, and Kenneth Juster.
Most of them have sailed through the confirmation process at a politically favorable time, when India’s rising weight begged for a quick shoo-in. But such is the prevalent malaise in Washington that all bets are off when it comes to political appointees, even as global strategic developments cry out for a quick replacement.
India was not alone in this regard. Two years into his terms, the Biden White House has still not managed to get ambassadors to 40 world capitals. There has been no US ambassador to Saudi Arabia for almost as long, and that hasn’t turned out too well for the United States.
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