Because the U.S. Census shows it has a lower percentage of population relative to other states, Massachusetts is one of the states losing a U.S. House seat during its redistricting process this year. But before Bay State cartographers can put pen to paper, they have to solve a simple math problem: what to do with 10 members who want 9 seats?
According to Roll Call, the Democratic Party may be expected to dust off its Joe Sestak file on how (not) to coax a candidate into swapping a campaign for a cushy administration job. Here’s what one operative had to say about a potential match-up of Democratic incumbents:
“I think that’s unlikely to happen unless there’s some decision made at a higher level that such should be the case,” said Philip Johnston, former chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, who also suggested national party leaders would have to find a soft landing for either of those Members, such as an ambassadorship, in order for them to willingly leave their seats.
If you were a voter, would you want to be represented by someone who’s willing to be bought into retirement instead of fighting for reelection? Besides, how long would an ambassadorship last if President Barack Obama gets beat in 18 months? As most of the Massachusetts Democratic Congressional delegation knows, winning a seat in Congress virtually assures one of lifetime tenure.
Trading a long-term job for a short-term payoff isn’t a graceful exit. It’s an explicit admission that representing a constituency isn’t worth the price of fighting a competitive campaign.
Roll Call says Club for Growth President Chris Chocola is readying his group for another take-down effort of a moderate GOP senator.
Chocola, a former Congressman from Indiana who served in the House from 2003 to 2007, told ABC’s “Top Line” that his fiscally conservative organization is considering getting involved in Lugar’s 2012 re-election campaign in the Hoosier State. The club has already met with Lugar’s primary opponent, state Treasurer Richard Mourdock (R).
Club for Growth already helped scare former Senator Arlen Specter into switching parties rather than face one-time CG president Pat Toomey in a primary. Specter wound up losing the Democratic nomination to former Rep. Joe Sestak. Toomey ultimately prevailed in the general election.
With Lugar’s (lack of) residency in Indiana and tutelage of President Barack Obama likely to become campaign issues, Indiana just might elect a conservative the rest of America deserves.
Finally, some above-the-fray bipartisanship! Tomorrow former Senator Chuck Hagel (R-NE) will support Congressman Joe Sestak’s (D-PA) bid to enter the body Hagel once inhabited. On the surface, the endorsement can be rationalized. Both men served in the military (Hagel in the Army, Sestak in the Navy), and neither could be confused with a strong ideological commitment to forceful shows of American power.
However, there’s probably something more to Hagel’s otherwise ineffectual endorsement. (He is virtually unknown to Pennsylvania voters, and his refusal to back Republican Pat Toomey won’t come as a surprise to anyone familiar with Hagel’s moderate record.) With Obama Defense Secretary Robert Gates (another middle-of-the-road-Republican) retiring at the end of next year, look for Hagel to get extra attention to replace him.
On the other hand, there could be genuine benefit for Hagel — albeit symbolic. Hagel is rightly understood as trying out for a Cabinet job and the more he can show a willingness to put party aside to do what he believes is the right thing, the more attractive he will be to President Obama and his inner circle.
It will be interesting to see if — and where — Hagel chooses to insert himself between now and Nov. 2 and what benefit, if any, he accrues in the eyes of the White House for those endorsements.
Funny how the “right thing” in this scenario is calculated to boost Hagel’s chances at landing one of the most important jobs in the United States government. Hey, we can’t all be political martyrs – right, Pat Toomey?
If only the indicted former Illinois governor could have passed on the chance to be first elected official to do business with the Obama White House political machine he too might be just another “coincidence” in need of rationalizing. At first, Blagojevich seemed to be a bad Sopranos version of a big state governor. The hair, leather jackets, and the boyishly insincere claims of innocence made it easy to dismiss him as a buffoon unskilled in the art of negotiating political favors. (FBI tapes of him dropping f-bombs while daydreaming about running a nonprofit or a cabinet department didn’t help either.)
Then came revelations that Democratic Senate candidates Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania and Andrew Romanoff of Colorado were offered varying types of political compensation not to run against Obama’s preferred incumbents. Now it sounds as if Arlen Specter – the party switching moderate Sestak defeated – is signaling he’d like a sweetheart deal after Keystone State voters refused to renew his contract.
Sources tell ABC News that Sen. Arlen Specter, D-Pennsylvania, has informed the White House that he would like to consider remaining in public service after his Senate term ends at the end of this session, and White House officials are keeping an open mind about possible job openings for him.
So, THAT’S the difference! Blago should have “informed” the White House that “he would like to consider” increasing his public service to include Washington, D.C. – perhaps after the governor nominated President Obama’s friend Valerie Jarrett to fill his Senate seat.
Some who know Specter say he’s eager to go out with a bang — to have a more majestic career-ender — and not to be known in perpetuity as a party switcher, an inquisitor of Anita Hill, or as a leading advocate on the Warren Commission of the single-bullet theory.
In this week’s Freedom Minute, CFIF’s Renee Giachino discusses the ongoing White House scandal involving Congressman Joe Sestak and key questions that those involved should have to answer before the White House is let off the hook.
So far, President Barack Obama is 0-for-everything when it comes to getting directly involved in any campaign other than his own. In a three month span, he helped lose Democratic campaigns for governor in Virginia and New Jersey, and the special election for the Massachusetts U.S. Senate seat.
Now, it looks like he picked losers in two Democratic primaries. Just when it seemed like the Joe Sestak pay-not-to-play offer couldn’t get weirder, the challenger in Colorado’s contested primary confirms that he too was approached about dropping out. For those keeping score, Sestak beat Arlen Specter and Andrew Romanoff currently leads 60%-40% over the appointed incumbent Michael Bennet. Whatever happened to the will of the people?
But what should we expect from a chief executive whose only “win” so far in office is a scandalously passed health care industry takeover that may go down as the most corrupt bargain ever brokered between a president and Congress. The lesson here is that this president is as hapless at electoral horse trading as he is with legislative deal making.
Apparently trying to contain the damage from last week’s blowup over allegations that the White House used President Clinton as the middleman in an attempt to bribe Rep. Joe Sestak out of the Pennsylvania senate race, the Obama Administration is now leaking that they did something similar in Colorado. From the AP:
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration dangled the possibility of a government job for former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff last year in hopes he would forgo a challenge to Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet, officials said Wednesday, just days after the White House admitted orchestrating a job offer in the Pennsylvania Senate race.
These officials declined to specify the job that was floated or the name of the administration official who approached Romanoff, and said no formal offer was ever made. They spoke on condition of anonymity, saying they were not cleared to discuss private conversations.
Romanoff is mounting a primary challenge to Senator Michael Bennet in the Centennial State’s Democratic primary, which won’t be held until August 10. By leaking this information now, the Obama Administration looks to be cynically trying to avoid a repeat of the Sestak controversy as the Colorado race progresses. With two months left and a candidate who has thus far been more tight-lipped than Sestak, the odds are against them. And while this may feed widespread notions of administration corruption, it also has the potential to divide Democrats who resent the White House choosing sides within the Democratic Party. Stay tuned: this could get interesting.
Fresh off revelations over his involvement in Sestak-gate, former president Bill Clinton pounded the podium yesterday in support of a fellow member of the Democratic Party’s endangered species: moderates. Senator Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) is facing a tough run-off against the sitting Lt. Governor who is allied with a vast leftwing conspiracy to make an example out of the on again, off again liberal.
Playing on both local pride and a wariness of outside influence, he suggested voters would be mere pawns for an agenda of party purification if they opposed Lincoln.
“If you want to be used that way, have at it,’ he said to about 200 Democrats at Philander Smith College, speaking without notes for 20 minutes
With a detailed recitation of Lincoln’s work on behalf of Arkansas down to the jobs she saved at a manufacturer in Ft. Smith, Clinton exhorted voters to not direct their discontent at her.
Good luck with that. Of all the endangered political species this election cycle, none seems as likely for a population reduction than “moderate” Democrats. Liberals, like conservatives, like politicians who take a consistent ideological stand for issues. Too often being a “moderate” is just code for policymaking as situational ethics. If Clinton fails to push Lincoln over the 50% mark, he’ll be on the hook for letting down yet another female senator seeking federal office (his wife Hillary being the other). With Obama 0-for-3 in hotly contested races, that means Democrats running for reelection in 2010 will have to look to someone other than the two most recent Democratic presidents to gin up enough support to get a win on Election Day.
Former Bush advisor Peter Wehner pens one of the more helpful analyses of the Obama White House today for Politics Daily:
We can hope that Obama, an intelligent man, learns from the errors of his ways. But the great danger in all of this is that in the face of his troubles Obama and his aides become increasingly defensive, display a greater sense of entitlement and even a touch of paranoia. When arrogant men lose control of events it can easily lead to feelings of isolation, to striking out at critics, to bullying opponents, and to straying across lines that should not be crossed.
And so the president needs to surround himself with people who can tamp down on the uglier impulses within his administration, who are willing to tell Obama that the lore created by him, Axelrod, Plouffe, and Gibbs during the campaign has given way to reality, that cockiness is not the same as wisdom, and that spin is no substitute for substantive achievements. And Obama needs someone who has standing in his life to tell him that the presidency is a revered institution that should not be treated as if it were a ward in Chicago.
The last line is the most telling because it goes to the nub of the problem facing every president: you go with what you know. For top level politics, that means once you assume high office the learning is over; all you have time for is applying your principles and experiences to the situation of the moment. For Obama, that means two things: rallying the troops for an us-vs.-them campaign, and treating every political decision as though being president is the same as being the mayor of Chicago – which is to say, a distributor of political patronage.
The criminal silliness of the Sestak Scandal can only be understood in the context of brash, Illinois-style horse trading. That it happened isn’t much of a surprise. That it happened without much subtlety and discretion is – to me – much more troubling. Like Obama’s naïve approach to America’s enemies and his self-indulgent speeches, this is yet another example of his immaturity.
Since the Obama Administration and newly minted Senate candidate Joe Sestak (D-PA) won’t discuss Sestak’s February allegation that a White House official offered him a job not to primary party-switching Arlen Specter, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) is looking into the matter. As CFIF readers remember, Issa’s interest is not desired by most people in public life. The conservative foil to liberal Investigator-in-Chief Henry Waxman (D-CA), Issa is now comparing the Obama-Sestak offer to the Watergate fiasco.
That may be going a bit far, but the facts – and the stonewalling – are at least as important to uncover as the Valerie Plame Affair. In that case, the Vice President’s Chief of Staff was convicted of four felonies for lying to federal agents and obstructing their investigation. Notice any similarities with Press Secretary Robert Gibbs’ refusal to comment, and the White House declining to appoint an independent investigator?
It sounds old to keep comparing how the media would be covering Obama’s actions if done by Bush, but the contrasts are still striking. This is now the second time potentially illegal negotiations over a United States Senate seat have been linked to Obama’s White House. The first instance cost Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich his job and may yet lead to a prison sentence. Now, another round of Chicago-style deal making may imperil Joe Sestak’s senate campaign. At some point, you’d think lower level Democrats would start reconsidering their allegiance to a president who clearly favors backroom deals to open electoral processes.
For three months, the White House has refused to say whether it offered a job to Representative Joe Sestak to get him to drop his challenge to Senator Arlen Specter in a Pennsylvania Democratic primary, as Mr. Sestak has asserted.
“But the White House wants everyone who suspects that something untoward, or even illegal, might have happened to rest easy; though it still will not reveal what happened, the White House is reassuring skeptics that it has examined its own actions and decided it did nothing wrong. Whatever it was that it did.” — Peter Baker,The New York Times
That’s about as succinct an explanation of a growing kerfuffle as can be written. The kerfuffle is growing because the second worst White House Press Secretary in living memory, Robert Gibbs, decided to run a cutesy stonewall when Sestak first made his allegation (when the White House was against his candidacy before it was for his candidacy), and now has escalated it into the annals of political kerfuffledom.
It would take a Special Prosecutor longer to get an office set up than it would to resolve this.
Someone (maybe multiple someones) carrying a White House briefcase said something to Sestak about a job, seemingly linked to him abandoning his candidacy. Couldn’t have been a very long conversation.
Interview Sestak. Interview the someone (or someones). Conclude whether or not there is reason to believe the conversation crossed the legal line. Conclude whether or not any party interviewed committed perjury during the really brief investigation. Proceed to grand jury or issue a report.
But hey. Summer’s here. Let’s instead have yet another spittle-spewing Washington circus.
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