The sound was so faint that I couldn’t quite pick out the tune the Marine Corps band was playing in the background of President Obama’s State of the Union address last month when he stressed the importance of statesmanship. But now I’m pretty sure it was “Send in the Clowns.”

I don’t know what other conclusion to draw after watching some of Obama’s ambassadorial nominees perform during their Senate confirmation hearings over the past weeks.

Max Baucus is the longtime lawmaker from Montana appointed to possibly the most delicate of all American diplomatic postings — ambassador to China. During his hearing, Baucus was asked about the Chinese proclamation of an air-defense zone that covers territory also claimed by Japan and South Korea. “I’m no real expert on China,” Baucus cheerfully admitted.

Colleen Bell, whose main qualifications to be U.S. ambassador to Hungary are that she wrote the TV soap opera “The Bold and the Beautiful” and raised more than half a million bucks for President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, was asked what the major strategic U.S. interests are in the country where she’ll soon be in charge of American diplomacy.

Keep in mind that in her final months as secretary of State, Hillary Clinton sent Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban a letter essentially saying that this fellow member nation of NATO is backsliding into dictatorship.

Bell’s reply: “I think our key priorities are to improve upon, as I mentioned, the security relationship and also the law enforcement and to promote business opportunities, increase trade.”

Argentina, once among the staunchest U.S. allies in South America, has been steadily drifting away into the leftist orbit of Venezuela. So naturally the guy we’re sending to repair relations is somebody who’s never set foot in the country.

“I haven’t had the opportunity yet to be there,” Noah Bryson Mamet told senators. Probably he was too busy raising money for the Democratic Party. In fact, fundraising for Democrats is the only job Mamet has held in his adult life.

Yet Baucus, Bell and Mamet looked magnificently Kissingerian compared with George Tsunis, the New York hotel magnate who will be taking over the U.S. embassy in Norway. First he started chattering about the Norwegian president, who doesn’t exist (the country is a monarchy). Then he was asked about Norway’s Progress Party, which has advocated an immigration crackdown. “You get some fringe elements that have a microphone and spew their hatred,” Tsunis said. “And I will tell you Norway has been very quick to denounce them.”

“The government has denounced them?” asked an astonished Sen. John McCain, who then pointed out that the Progress Party is part of Norway’s ruling parliamentary coalition.

Obama is by no means the first president to use ambassadorial appointments as a political spoils system. But Obama seems to be playing with unseemly enthusiasm these days. During his first term, about two-thirds of the ambassadors were career Foreign Service officers and one-third political appointees, fairly close to the average for previous presidents.

Since his re-election, however, more than half of Obama’s appointees have been political, nearly a third of them major campaign fundraisers. Presidents used to sell nights in the Lincoln bedroom to fund their campaigns. Obama has raised the ante to Argentina and Norway.

Glenn Garvin is a columnist for The Miami Herald.

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