The danger of speaking for money
For the second time in a week, it has emerged that a person who could become the next president of the United States is giving speeches for US$200,000 ($289,545) a pop. Last week it was former Vice-President Joe Biden; now it’s Nikki Haley, the former US ambassador to the United Nations, who is quoting that price for her speeches, CNBC reports.
Everyone who does this is engaging in an increasingly dangerous gamble with their political future.
Haley appears to have more motivation than most former public servants to hit the speaking circuit. Her public financial disclosures have listed as much as US$1 million in debt, though her spokesman said the more recent figure is less than US$500,000.
But personal justifications aside, it’s hard to know the impact down the line. Haley is widely viewed as the biggest rising star in the Republican Party — perhaps the one member of the Trump Administration who has escaped it with her political future intact, and how. But any presidential campaigns for her will be four, eight or even more years away.
Back in 2016, it was Hillary Clinton’s many speeches (for even larger sums) that dogged her campaign for the presidency. Polling showed Americans wanted to see the transcripts by a margin of 64 per cent to 19 per cent, and Clinton at times struggled to justify things like taking US$675,000 from Goldman Sachs.
Biden is also something of a cautionary tale. The New York Times reported last week that Biden gave a US$200,000 speech to a conservative-leaning economic group in Michigan.
Even if you set aside the objections to taking an annual salary’s worth of pay for one speech, there’s the matter of what you said in that speech. There’s the matter of what those groups that paid you might come to stand for in American politics. And the potential unintended consequences only increase as the years pass.Unlike being a lobbyist, one speech does not tie you intensely to one group’s priorities. But you are associating yourself with a lot of different kinds of interests. Any one of them could wind up being problematic, even if you do everything possible to guard against the diciest ones. And what happens when the American public decides this is no longer an arrangement that passes the smell test, as it largely has with lobbyists serving in influential positions?
That’s a big risk to take with your political future.