U.S.-Style Campaigning at the U.N.
The election news these days focuses on various races for House and Senate seats. But there's another hotly contested race of great, even worldwide, interest: the selection of a new head of the U.N. World Food Program for the next five years.
In this race, there's really only one final voter, outgoing U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan -- though he has consulted with other top officials, especially Jacques Diouf , the head of the Food and Agriculture Organization, and the incoming secretary general, Ban Ki Moon .
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Sign Up for RSS FeedThe front-runner is the official Bush administration candidate, Josette Sheeran, undersecretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs. The post most always goes to an American, but this time there are two in the running. The other is Tony Banbury , head of the World Food Program in Asia.
Banbury, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said last week, "is a very capable person" who worked at the National Security Council in the Clinton administration and stayed on in the first year of the Bush administration. Banbury has supporters within the administration who wanted him to be the official candidate, we're told.
The race has taken on some of the trappings of a real campaign.
Sheeran, formerly a managing editor and 16-year employee of the Washington Times, doesn't have experience running a food aid program, but she's campaigning hard. She's touting her work at State and before that as deputy U.S. trade representative. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has been working the phones for her.
She's even put out an attractive four-page campaign brochure -- paid for by the State Department -- with a fine cover photo of her standing in front of a field of grain. "Fighting Hunger -- Management Leadership, Development Expertise," is the campaign motto. "Specifically my platform includes the following five points," she says in the brochure, laying out broad themes to feed the world's hungry.
And much as in a campaign, detractors in the blogosphere have gone negative, hammering Sheeran about her lack of experience and her lengthy membership in the controversial Rev. Sun Myung Moon 's Unification Church, where she got married at one of those mass weddings. She left the church eight or nine years ago, we're told.
Then there was a 1992 article she wrote in the Times about her interview with the late Kim Il Sung , a founding father of the axis of evil. She described the North Korean leader as "presenting the image of a self-confident, reflective elder statesman rather than the reclusive, dogmatic dictator he is usually portrayed as in the West."
"We don't need nuclear weapons," she quoted him as saying. "What is the use of producing one or two nuclear weapons while the big countries have several thousand, several tens of thousands of nuclear weapons? And we don't have a delivery system either." Not then, they didn't.
The oddsmakers say Sheeran gets the nod.
At Least He Has Massoud
It's been a somewhat turbulent year for Kenneth Y. Tomlinson , former editor in chief of Reader's Digest and now chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which oversees the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio and TV Marti in Cuba, and Radio Free Asia.
Back in August, the State Department's inspector general dinged him for hiring a friend as a consultant for $244,000 and overbilling the government for his time. The report also found that Tomlinson had used his office to run his thoroughbred horse operation. The broadcasting board split 3-3 on partisan lines on whether to fire him, so he remains in the job until a replacement is found, which could easily be another two years.
Tomlinson said the allegations were part of a "political vendetta."
And a close look at one of his e-mails dealing with the ponies during work time makes it quite clear that the racing operation was not completely unrelated to his work for the Board of Governors. Sure, the message to "Colleagues" starts out: "Now put a gun to my head and I gotta say that Clement's Scabbard will win the forth race at Delaware."
But he also is clearly focused on international matters, especially when talking about his horse, Massoud. "Afghan Foreign Minister Abdullah Abdullah once told me [the late leader Ahmed Shah ] Massoud loved fast horses and that his followers often made gifts of horses to him."
You can read the lengthy, entertaining e-mail at http:/
From the West Wing to the Marines
On the move from the White House to Afghanistan . . . Kenneth Rapuano , formerly deputy undersecretary at the Energy Department for counterterrorism and since July 2004 a deputy assistant to the president for homeland security, has volunteered for active duty as a lieutenant colonel in the Marines to serve with the Joint Special Operations Command in Afghanistan.
