By Patricia H. Kushlis
Whatever one thinks about the contents and delivery of Senator Barack Obama’s speech to a ‘modest-sized’ crowd of over 200,000 at Berlin’s Tiergarten Park last Thursday or, for that matter any of the other stops on his week long overseas trip to meet the world, one has to marvel at the Bush administration’s head-in-the-sand reaction.
In short, the administration behaved as if the Senator from the Great State of Illinois didn’t exist – or at least his campaign related touch-downs in Europe and the Middle East had never happened. Now why the administration thought that if it played the invisible man game everyone else would follow is beyond me.
But I think that's what happened.
Now, I don’t blame the White House for not including a speech text – or video of any of the highlights – on the presidential webpage. That would, of course, be inappropriate. But you’d think the State Department, at least, would have included even just one or two tiny links to the speech or Obama’s trip otherwise on State.gov - its made-for-Americans-only webpage - if only for credibility’s sake.
Nope. Nada. Rien. Nein.
Ah, but last I checked, I could join a chat (or read the transcript) with the US Ambassador to Canada – although I don’t think Ambassador David Wilkins would have liked the questions I might have raised about his own questionable activities in support of a recent McCain campaign visit to Ottawa - or I could drink in photo after photo and video after video of Condi. I could also click on a banner news report of how happy the US government is that the Cyprus negotiations are supposed to resume on September 3 (that’s the good news – and it is good news because a Cyprus resolution is far too long in coming).
But even a whiff of a reference to Obama’s recent visit to Berlin, Paris, London or the Middle East just doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on State.gov. And yes, I did try the search engine.
Also nothing on Dipnote, the Department’s blog which somewhere along the line must have decided WhirledView no longer deserves a place on its blog roll. Now that’s OK. Dipnote is not on our blogroll either and we don't exactly toe the party line; but more to the point, Dipnote, like State.gov brims over with oversized Condi photos – post after post after post in a kind of cult of the personality rollout befitting, well you fill in the blank. Princess Sparklepony must be having a field day.
A trip almost airbrushed out?
The administration’s airbrushing out of Obama’s overseas trip, however, reminds me of the old Stalin Politburo pictures in which the cult of the personality’s personal and political enemies were disappeared one after the other by anonymous airbrush-wielding editors.
Now to be fair, I checked America.gov (the website officially kept away from the American public by the outdated Smith-Mundt Act despite the fact that our tax payers dollars finance its existence) and lo and behold discovered a “Campaign Trail blog” by Michelle Austein who tried to put Obama’s whirlwind international tour into perspective for a non-American audience as best she could, given possible State Department constraints. More power to her.
Her main point to foreign readers was that now the media is global, one should see Obama’s speech in Germany as primarily aimed at American voters at home. Well yes – after all he was accompanied by a raft of celebrity-type American journalists reporting his every comment to the home folk and one has to be an American citizen to vote; but no – the Tiergarten speech was clearly multi-faceted and from the way I read it, designed to address audiences foreign and domestic.
Austein made a good point, but the most useful part of the post for me was her link to the speech itself as carried by The New York Times. Now why she didn’t post a copy of the speech direct from the Obama campaign website is beyond me. When I worked in the same bureau under USIA leadership or as an Embassy Information Officer overseas I would have gone to the horse’s mouth for the text, in this case the Obama campaign, but times, I guess, have changed for those working for State today. Wouldn’t want to link directly to the “enemy” – now would we?
Political Appointee Ambassadors Above the Law?
Regardless, one of our apparently dimmer bulb political appointee Ambassadors refused to allow US Embassy staff assigned to Berlin to attend Obama’s speech. The rationale: such attendance by US career employees violated The Hatch Act and this part of the trip was paid for by the Obama campaign, not US taxpayers so it was, therefore, off limits.
Yet, anyone who reads The Hatch Act will note that even employees “who may not participate in politically partisan activities” as is the case for career US Foreign Service Officers and Civil Servants are expressly permitted to “attend political rallies and meetings.” Read it for yourself: the Hatch Act link on the Office of the Special Counsel’s webpage comes from the gutsy FSO who writes Life After Jerusalem.
It seems to me, therefore, that US Ambassador William R. Timken, Jr. and Under Secretary for Management Patrick Kennedy need to rethink their interpretation of the Act and fast. The US Ambassador to Canada and big time South Carolina Republican Party fundraiser David Wilkins should also take another look because he may well have violated another section of the same law during a McCain campaign related visit to Ottawa in June that he, Wilkins, facilitated and attended.
The Hatch Act language is painstakingly clear. Timken’s interpretation of a law designed in part to protect professional bureaucrats from being politically proselytized by political appointee bosses was not “just excessively narrow” as Under Secretary Patrick Kennedy is quoted as saying in Karen DeYoung’s Washington Post story on Saturday, it was just plain a violation. And as far as Wilkins’ activities and support of John McCain are concerned, it really depends upon whether the Ambassador attended or helped arrange the event while “on duty, in a government office or used a government vehicle” presumably to transport himself to and from the $100 a plate business club’s lunch where McCain spoke. These questions I can’t answer – but perhaps others can.
Now I realize this administration decided long ago that it was above the laws of the land –but maybe it should turn over a new leaf. Abiding by Hatch Act provisions might be just as good a place to start as any.