Biden on the defensive as he conf irms envoy to UK
JOE Biden yesterday announced he intends to appoint America’s first woman ambassador to Britain in 45 years.
Jane Hartley, 71, is a prominent Democratic fundraiser who was US ambassador to France and Monaco during the Obama administration.
Her selection for the prestigious diplomatic post at the Court of St James’s was first reported in the Daily Mail in September. Mr Biden announced the decision yesterday just hours before he gave a rare press conference – his first formal event since November and with his administration under intense pressure.
Marking a year since he entered the White House, the President has seen his big projects fail to get off the ground and his Democrats face a drubbing at the midterm elections in November.
‘I didn’t overpromise. I have probably outperformed what anybody thought would happen. We are in a situation where we have made enormous progress,’ he said over criticism on rising inflation and Covid figures.
He said he needed his rival Republicans ‘to get in the game for this country’ and help him pass new legislation, something that seems unlikely given the current stalemate between the two side.
Mr Biden refused to ‘scale down his ambitions’ and passed the blame as he said: ‘I did not anticipate there’d be such a stalwart effort to make sure that the most important thing was that President Biden didn’t get anything done. Think about this. What are Republicans for?’
A new Gallup poll shows Mr Biden has an approval rating of just 40 per cent, down from 57 per cent when he took office. Only Donald Trump’s first year averages were lower in the period since 1945.
Not only is the Omicron variant surging but inflation is at a 40-year high. And Mr Biden’s Build Back Better Act, a £1.2trillion spending plan, is stalled despite him having made major concessions.
Thanks to a Senate that is split 50/50, the Democrats have also been hit by stalemate in their plans to push through voting rights reform.
Even normally sympathetic media outlets have taken to writing about the need for ‘revamps’ and ‘resets’ to stop his first term flopping.
In his first year in office, Mr Biden has held just six solo press conferences. In his final year in the Oval Office, Mr Trump held 35.
The choice of Miss Hartley, a mother of two who is married to a multi-millionaire financier, surprised Washington insiders because she is neither a close friend of Mr Biden nor one of his campaign’s top tier of fundraisers – the usual criteria for earning such a plum job.
However, White House insiders say the President wanted to reward her loyalty after she stuck by him in the early faltering stages of his election campaign. The ambassadorship is usually one of the first to be announced by an incoming leader but Mr Biden reportedly had difficulty finding the right candidate.
Former secretary of state Colin Powell and former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg were approached but both turned down the job, according to reports.
Miss Hartley will move with her husband Ralph Schlosstein into Winfield House, a mansion in Regent’s Park with 12 and a half acres of grounds – the second largest private garden in the capital after Buckingham Palace.
Anne Armstrong was the first woman US ambassador to the UK, appointed by Gerald Ford in 1976.
Miss Hartley, a veteran Democratic supporter, worked in the White House between 1978 and 1980 in Jimmy Carter’s administration. She moved into the private sector as a TV executive, followed by 20 years at an economic consulting firm, the Observatory Group.
Top Biden fundraiser rewarded with UK envoy role Mail, September 14, 2021
‘Rewarding her for loyalty’