Continue Reading...

Ignore Republicans, like Rep. Darrell Issa, who want you to think there's been some nefarious violation of the law here. After all, there's no indication any actual promises of jobs were made -- which means even former Bush administration officials are saying there doesn't seem to be any evidence of any crime. (And Romanoff had already applied online for jobs with the administration when deputy White House chief of staff Jim Messina contacted him to discuss options.) What the disclosures about Sestak and Romanoff really show is that the White House political machine isn't doing its job very well.

Continue Reading...

So far, the alleged scandal that supposedly threatens the Obama presidency doesn't amount to much: a verbal mention of a nonpaying advisory post to Rep. Joe Sestak in a conversation with Clinton, and an e-mail mentioning three administration jobs to Andrew Romanoff, the Democratic speaker of the Colorado state assembly, dangled in order to dissuade them from entering primaries against incumbents favored by the president.

If clumsiness were an indictable offense, then the White House officials responsible for those overtures might well be in trouble. But when people compare such ham-handed deal-making with the crimes of Watergate, it can only mean that they don't remember what the country and the Constitution endured under Nixon -- or that they cynically assume nobody else does.

Continue Reading...

But at a moment like this, it is worth remembering that Republican scheming to impeach Bill Clinton began long before Monica Lewinsky appeared on the public stage -- and those grandiose notions seemed easy enough to laugh off at the time, too.

Theories about impeachable offenses committed by Clinton began to appear in right-wing forums as early as 1994, when such "scandals" as Whitewater, the FBI files screw-up and the White House Travel Office imbroglio were still new. To most observers those theories still sounded like a joke over the ensuing years, right up through the fall of 1997, when Bob Tyrrell, then the editor of the American Spectator, convened a dinner of conservatives at a Capitol Hill restaurant to plot the impeachment of Clinton.

Continue Reading...

That the story has become a major controversy, a regular fixture on cable news chat shows and a momentum-killer for Sestak following his come-from behind victory against Specter in last week's Pennsylvania primary is evidence of how the White House mishandled the controversy, according to conversations with several high-level Democratic strategists.

Indeed, Sestak has been hurt so badly that he currently leads his opponent by three points. (Before this scandal destroyed his momemtum, Sestak trailed Toomey by five points.)

Elsewhere this morning, famous Republican opinion writer and Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan was fascinated by this important true fact about Barack Obama:

What continues to fascinate me is Mr. Obama's standing with Democrats. They don't love him. Half the party voted for Hillary Clinton, and her people have never fully reconciled themselves to him. But he is what they have.

Continue Reading...

The White House will release a memo from Rahm Emanuel to former President Clinton. Clinton was instructed to ask Rep. Sestak about his intentions.

And according to the New York Times, Clinton was gauging Sestak's interest in "a prominent, but unpaid, advisory position." Rahm Emanuel didn't want Sestak to leave the House of Representatives, so a real job was never even offered.

The last sentence here is the understatement of the month:

Continue Reading...

After a vote in the House, Sestak wandered out of the chamber and was immediately surrounded by nearly a dozen reporters. There was serious business to investigate, after all; someone somewhere had engaged in a political act, in a way that might have influenced politics! Many candidates would have walked away immediately. Sestak, though, is congenitally unable to ignore people waiting to talk to him (and constantly apologizes when, inevitably, the conversation does come to an end). So after waiting five minutes or so for a reporter from the Allentown, Pa., Morning Call to show up, he started taking questions about the "scandal" over the job offer.

As it turned out, he had very little to say. "All this will come all out tomorrow," he said, stumbling over his words as he tried to assure the media scrum that President Obama's promise that the White House would issue a statement on the matter "shortly" would, in fact, come true. "All this will come out, I think, as soon as the White House decides to speak, and then I'll have something to say."

Continue Reading...

But here's the thing. None of that will do any good. There is no winning with these noise machine pseudo-scandals. They have an alternate media structure that is designed to stoke scandal fever and the way they keep the mainstream media on the hook is with "smell tests" and demands that the person address the claims, apologize or make amends, none of which will be deemed adequate and all of which necessitate another round of investigations, demands, etc. With every impossible requirement that isn't met, the press will become more convinced that the person must be hiding something, is too hot to handle, and will eventually agree that he has to step down or quit the race because "the scandal" is devouring him.

Continue Reading...

But as Alex Pareene has already noted, this isn't exactly the first time someone in politics cut a deal for a job. When Sen. Judd Gregg was going to leave Congress to join the Obama administration -- which, in the end, he didn't do, because he realized he disagreed with everything President Obama stands for -- he wasn't going to take the appointment to become commerce secretary unless his replacement in New Hampshire's Senate seat would caucus with the GOP.

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...

Leaving aside the fact that the White House denies this ever happened, there's no way on Earth a vague "job offer" in exchange for leaving a Senate race constitutes a "bribe," let alone a violation of the law. If that's the case, we should probably appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether Sen. Judd Gregg committed extortion when he demanded that the White House force a Democratic governor to appoint a Republican to his seat if they wanted him to be their commerce secretary.

The White House gave in to his outrageous demands. And then Gregg backed out of the job after accepting it! Perhaps he should also be investigated for "breach of oral contract" or something, as long as we're in a special prosecutor-appointing mood.

Continue Reading...

Take the crucial Pennsylvania Senate contest, where Republican Pat Toomey essentially spent the last year running ahead of Arlen Specter, who had been the presumed Democratic nominee. The Democrats who were propping up Specter insisted he would be the party's best general election bet, even though his 30 years in the Senate seemed to clash with the public's anti-incumbent mood. Specter, of course, lost last week's Democratic primary to Joe Sestak -- and Sestak has, at least in the initial post-primary polling, opened a small lead over Toomey.

Continue Reading...

Back in February, Sestak off-handedly mentioned that, last July, he was offered a job by the White House if he would agree not to run against Arlen Specter in the Democratic Senate primary. Darrell Issa would like to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate this serious "bribe."

The RNC is making the supposed bribe the subject of press releases, Sestak and Robert Gibbs both fielded questions about it on the Sunday morning shows, and their non-answers made the papers today. In other words, this is going to be an issue for a while. Whether it goes away depends primarily on whether the Republicans think they can get anyone outside of Fox Nation interested in it. Which may be a problem, because the story is pretty thin:

Continue Reading...

But this week's Richard Blumenthal drama in Connecticut is bringing some apprehension back to the surface.

It remains to be seen whether Blumenthal, who entered his state's Senate race as a white knight poised to save his party from Chris Dodd's collapse, will sustain much permanent damage from a New York Times story that suggested he's embellished his military record. Blumenthal has mounted a vigorous defense and video has now emerged that shows him properly characterizing his service. The story may fizzle out and Blumenthal could return to his dominant position in the polls relatively unscathed.

Continue Reading...

In a race few voters bothered to show up for, Rep. Joe Sestak ended Specter's political career after 30 years in the Senate, defeating him easily -- the AP declared Sestak the victor less than three hours after the polls closed -- to win the Democratic nomination for the seat Specter held. He'll face Republican Pat Toomey, who drove Specter from the GOP primary last year, in the fall.

A few minutes after the news broke, Specter strode into a half-empty ballroom in a Center City hotel and said a quick goodbye. "It's been a great privilege to serve the people of Pennsylvania," he said. "And it's been a great privilege to be in the United States Senate. I'll be working very, very hard for the people of the commonwealth in the coming months. Thank you all." And then he strode off the stage, his eyes rimmed in red, accompanied by his wife, Joan, his son Shanin and his granddaughters. And an already mopey party turned downright pathetic. (The DJ said he'd been told to play upbeat music, but avoided anything too celebratory "in case he don't win.")

Continue Reading...

"I just voted for you -- good luck!" one woman said. "Thanks for coming through our lobby." Another man stopped him as well. "You just got mine, too, Admiral," he told Sestak. "And it's time to get rid of him. I mean that." "Him," of course, would be Sen. Arlen Specter, and as Sestak visited polling places in Center City Philadelphia on Election Day morning, he seemed pretty confident he'd do the job.

"I feel pretty gratified," he said. "When I went and made that decision back in July -- when I visited those six, seven counties -- what to do, whether to get in when the Democratic establishment said, 'Sit down,' I found people that were hurting... Slowly over time, as people got to know us, they're giving me an opportunity to renew their faith, their trust that maybe we can change Washington, D.C., once again."

Continue Reading...

But the actual president? He'll be literally flying over the state around lunchtime, on his way to Youngstown, Ohio (just past Pennsylvania's western border), to talk up signs of an economic recovery.

Which, if you look at the final days of the Senate primary between Specter and his surging rival, Rep. Joe Sestak, is probably apt. Obama has been hovering over the race all along, endorsing Specter in exchange for his switch from Republican to Democrat last year, throwing his former campaign apparatus into the fray on Specter's behalf and -- in the last couple of weeks -- urging supporters to back the incumbent in TV ads, radio spots and automated phone calls. Specter's whole campaign, especially the crucial get-out-the-vote operation in Philadelphia, boils down to his ties to the president. But as the race comes to a close, Sestak has been trying to walk a delicate line, too. Sure, he's the rogue insurgent who isn't afraid to take on the party establishment, but he's also careful to say he wants to be Obama's "closest ally" if he makes it to the Senate. And yet Sestak's camp is expecting most of the "surge" voters who came out two years ago to vote for Obama to stay home.

Continue Reading...

The surging challenger didn't mention that particular act of Republican loyalty in his stump speech Sunday, but he probably didn't have to. The couple hundred people who showed up were all Sestak loyalists, some of whom shouted, "Retire!" whenever he mentioned his incumbent rival. "He's a man on a mission," Colleen Guiney, a pediatric nurse practitioner from Swarthmore, Pa., who chairs the local Democratic Party committee, told me. The rally was in the heart of the district Sestak has represented in the House since 2006, and his campaign headquarters was only a few blocks away. The theme from "Top Gun" blared from the speakers, alternating with the 1992 Clinton campaign anthem, "Don't Stop," until Sestak arrived (45 minutes after he was scheduled to be there).

Continue Reading...

Watch here, and look for a clever move early in the ad. As the narrator says the race is "a dead heat," newspaper headlines scroll past. But they don't say it's a dead heat -- they say Sestak is winning. That's a smart way to show wavering voters that the momentum is with the challenger. (For what it's worth, both public and private polls show the race is a dead heat.)

Continue Reading...

Continue Reading...