Quid Pro Quo
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has,appropriately, if belatedly, become the lead story in all news media. The scenes from the Gulf are heart-breaking, the stories increasingly disturbing and tragic.
It’s understandable, then, that the issues of government accountability and the transparency promised and lauded by Candidate Obama, but ignored and dismissed by President Obama have been relegated specifically to the Obama Administration’s role in the oil spill and subsequent environmental disaster.
But for Pennsylvania voters, there’s an issue that has been buried on the back pages, but which can be neither ignored nor dismissed.
According to Joe Sestak, the Democratic candidate for the Senate and a current member of the House, he was offered a job by the Obama Administration through former President Bill Clinton to stay out of the Pennsylvania Senate race. The Administration backed Sen. Arlen Specter and did not want a primary fight.
Sestak first raised the topic in an interview in late February where it seemed to fizzle and die–although he repeated the accusation as an example of how he was not a Washington insider when his numbers were in the single digits.
But with his win against Specter, the story resurfaced. Democrats waved their hands as if it was just so much gnattery, Republicans said it was an example of the corruption of the Obama Administration and legal scholars on both sides squirmed at the harsh reality: there’s an actual federal code prohibiting just such quid pro quo actions.
The squirminess transferred to the President himself when in a press conference two weeks ago–his first in ten months–a reporter went off the topic of the oil spill to ask about the Sestak story.
Instead of being up front and transparent as he should have been from the outset, Obama said that a response would be “forthcoming” on the subject, which was, he said, being reviewed internally.
Oh.
The answer finally came on May 29–over two months after Sestak first made the claim. Yes, the offer had been made. But it was not improper and no big deal.
Wrong.
It doesn’t take an anti-Obama conservative to understand the law. Consider the response from a well-known legal expert who is not a conservative–law professor and constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley.
Turley was stunned by the revelation and said so in a column mere hours after the White House finally released its months-in-coming “yeah, we offered him a job, so what?” response.
Turley noted: “It is remarkable how quickly Democrats have forgiven such abuses and condemned those who object as simply naive. This is precisely what moral relativists in politics want of voters: to treat all political corruption as a fixed reality of government.”
Turley went on to say, “The White House is not allowed to trade government positions for political advantages. It is particularly abusive to hand out positions in the intelligence field–particularly with the continued intelligence failures of the last year. What makes this even more outrageous is that Sestak did not even qualify for the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board [the position offered to Sestak].”
What Turley didn’t know when he wrote those words was that Sestak was not the only candidate to be offered a job to stay out of a primary.
On June 2, Andrew Romanoff, who is challenging incumbent Sen. Michael Bennett in Colorado, said he had been offered one of three positions by Obama’s deputy Chief of Staff. Romanoff said he was told two high-ranking positions at USAID and the director’s position at the U.S. Trade and Development Agency “might be available to me were I not pursuing the Senate race.”
Sestak should feel undersold: The U.S. Trade and Development Agency director’s position has a $55 million budget and a staff of 78 people. It also requires Senate confirmation.
There have been numerous–and unanswered–questions about what job Sestak was really offered. Most insiders agree he was actually offered the job of Secretary of the Navy because the current SoN is considering leaving. Given the choices offered to Romanoff, it’s difficult to believe that Sestak would have been offered so much less.
The Romanoff revelation only serves to raise more questions about the Sestak debacle. It also raises serious questions about what role the President has been playing in the primaries.
For Pennsylvanians, the questions need answers. Sestak only made the offer public in an effort to raise his own numbers in the polls. But Sestak is a Democrat and if elected would answer to the current president–also a Democrat–as well as to the people of Pennsylvania. The Obama Administration was wrong and likely criminal in offering the job to Sestak.
The blowback for Sestak is that he now looks even sleazier than he did during the primary. Sestak has a history of not answering questions. Pennsylvanians still want to know why he was forced to resign from the only job he ever had, the Navy. Sestak says what he said when pressed for details about Obama’s job offer: it’s not relevant.
This surly attitude that both the Obama White House and our own candidate have toward voters is more than a little disconcerting. We expected it from the likes of Bush and Cheney, but this was supposed to be a new day in government and a new era of transparency. Sestak himself said his election was a “victory for democracy.” So why does it look so much like old-school Beltway politics as usual?
The fact is, the right shouldn’t be leading the calls for an independent investigation of these quid pro quo offers–the Democrats should.
Think about it for ten seconds–never mind who you supported in the Pennsylvania primary or who you might support in the Colorado primary. Who do you want to choose who runs or doesn’t? The President of the U.S. or the voters?
This isn’t a monarchy. We choose our politicians by voting, not by presidential fiat. And it would seem that if any more such scandals are revealed about this White House, voters are going to choose someone else come 2012, no matter what Mr. Obama might have to say.
