"Komoly hibának tartják, hogy Orbán mintha nem lenne tudatában annak, hogy az amerikai nagykövet asszony, Nancy Goodman Brinker a Bush család közeli jó barátja."
Amerikában ez hagyomány. Máshol korrupciónak nevezik. :))
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http://www.ilcampaign.org/ambassadors.doc
From The State Journal-Register, 6/25/01
Bush follows tradition by awarding ambassadorships for contributions
By DORI MEINERT
COPLEY NEWS SERVICE
WASHINGTON - Nancy Goodman Brinker doesn't speak Hungarian. The Peoria native also has no formal training in foreign policy.
Yet President Bush last month chose her to be the new U.S. ambassador to Hungary.
In doing so, he continued a long tradition of American presidents rewarding their political supporters with prestigious foreign posts.
Bush's early picks included a significant number of campaign donors, reigniting the long-running debate over the historic practice shunned by many other countries.
"It should be a concern among Americans that the biggest qualifications that some of our envoys have is their ability to write a check and not necessarily to deal with complex international issues," said Steven Weiss of the Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group that studies the role of money in the U.S. political system.
Brinker and her ex-husband, restaurant magnate Norman Brinker, contributed $125,000 to Republicans in the last election cycle. Nancy Brinker also is one of the Bush "Pioneers," having raised another $100,000 for the presidential campaign.
But 11 other ambassadorial nominees contributed more than Brinker.
Utah shopping mall developer John Price and his family gave $585,181 to Republican candidates, party committees, the recount fund and the inaugural committee, making him the most generous of the bunch, according to the center's calculations. For his efforts, Price was nominated to be ambassador to Mauritius, a tropical, 720-square-mile island in the Indian Ocean.
Cincinnati investment banker and former Bush business partner Mercer Reynolds has been nominated to be ambassador to Switzerland, one of the most desirable spots. Reynolds and his family donated $456,173 to GOP candidates. He and his partner in the investment firm Reynolds, DeWitt & Co. also bailed out Bush's struggling oil company in 1984.
William S. Farish, a millionaire horse breeder and chairman of Churchill Downs, which hosts the Kentucky Derby, expects to be heading to Great Britain. Farish is a close Bush family friend - he and his wife gave famed White House dog Millie to George and Barbara - and counts Queen Elizabeth as a longtime friend as well. He contributed $142,875.
Craig Stapleton, his wife and daughter gave just $61,500 to the GOP. But family ties help. His wife, Dorothy, is a Bush cousin, and he is a former partner with Bush in the Texas Rangers baseball team. Stapleton was named ambassador to the Czech Republic.
In addition to her campaign help, Nancy Brinker is a Bush family friend and founder of the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation, named for her sister, who died of the disease. Laura Bush has appeared frequently at foundation events in Dallas. Brinker points to her "long history of public service and interest in helping people" as qualifications for the embassy job in Budapest.
Meanwhile, career foreign service officers are being sent to trouble spots around the world - places like Israel, Pakistan, Yemen and Eritrea.
"In general, the political appointees go to very pleasant places. Budapest is a very pleasant place," said Warren Zimmermann, who was ambassador to Yugoslavia.
Since the Kennedy administration, political appointees have been averaging about 30 percent of the ambassador posts, according to the American Foreign Service Association, which represents 23,000 current and retired Foreign Service personnel. Recent Bush nominations have included more career diplomats, bringing his average down and more in line with the historic trend.
Often cited as one of the earliest examples of ambassadorships being used as political rewards - and also one of the more embarrassing - is Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to send Joseph P. Kennedy to London in 1937. Kennedy angered the British by publicly predicting that Nazi Germany would defeat them.
Ronald Reagan sent his longtime personal secretary, Helene von Damm, to Austria, her native country. While there, she engaged in a highly public affair with a prominent hotel owner, whom she married after divorcing her third husband.
But there also have been some surprising successes, including former child star Shirley Temple Black, who was sent by Reagan to the United Nations and Ghana and by Bush's father to Czechoslovakia.
Japan and Saudi Arabia are countries that prefer high-profile political appointees who are close to the president, some experts said.
Bush chose former Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker as ambassador to Japan. Easily confirmed by his former Senate colleagues, he follows a long line of political veterans in Tokyo, including former Vice President Walter Mondale.
Only a handful of nominees have been confirmed so far. The Senate's switch to Democratic control has delayed the process and may prompt Democrats to more aggressively challenge Bush's choices.
So far, Brinker still is relatively unknown to the Hungarian community in the United States and to foreign policy experts familiar with the region.
"I don't know her skills as a diplomat, but I heard she's very intelligent, charismatic, educated and has a great talent for running an organization," said Christina Bogyo, a Hungarian-American who works as a consultant for the World Bank.
But foreign policy experts struck a more cautionary note.
Hungary "is the kind of post that I think definitely requires somebody with very close knowledge of the area and hopefully of the country itself," former ambassador Zimmermann said. "It's a country that's emerged from communism to become a fledgling and now flourishing democracy.
"So like the other Eastern European countries, there's a lot of fragility in the system which I think requires a highly sophisticated approach by the United States."
If Brinker is confirmed, her greatest challenge will be to attract commercial and economic development to Hungary, said David Hughes, a retired Foreign Service officer who served as commercial attache in Hungary from 1989-91.
"That can be done by any number of people," said Hughes, who now heads the Hungarian-American Chamber of Commerce of the Pacific Northwest. "It doesn't take someone steeped in a thousand years of history and three years of language."