JONATHAN CHAIT MAY 26, 2010
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Slate's John Dickerson compares the Obama White House's silence on whether it offered Joe Sestak a job to the Bush administration's silence on the Plame allegation:
The questions about what Sestak was offered have been nagging for months. They were renewed after he defeated Specter. White House spokesman Robert Gibbs has responded as he did months ago. "Lawyers in the White House and others have looked into conversations that were had with Congressman Sestak and nothing inappropriate happened," he said multiple times last week.
Match this response with the one Scott McClellan gave in October 2003 when asked about what White House officials may have said about CIA official Valerie Plame. Reporters wanted to know who said what to whom. McClellan responded: "I spoke with those individuals … and those individuals assured me they were not involved in this."
The problem with both responses, of course, is that we can't just take the word of White House officials. Sestak says the offer was made, and the White House admits there were conversations. At least three laws might have been broken, according to Darrell Issa, the Ranking Member of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. With that many, it shouldn't be up to one of the interested parties to decide whether any laws were broken.
Wow, three laws! That's a lot of laws! Except it's not hard to find some Republican elected official to muse that the administration is breaking the law. They suggest this all the time. The plain fact is that there's no credible reason to believe that any law was broken.
You don't have to rely on the "the word of White House officials." There's no such thing as offering somebody a job in return for them dropping out of a Senate race. The acceptance of a job means dropping out of a Senate race. The concept of offering somebody a job "in exchange" for them declining to seek another job is like offering to marry a woman in exchange for her not marrying some other guy. It's conceptually nonsensical. The Plame allegation was a story because there was a credible charge of law-breaking. There is no such credible charge here.
Dickerson also repeats the ubiquitous trope about "transparency":
"trust us" isn't a satisfactory answer—no matter what the question. Building a stone wall is about the wall, not what the wall is hiding. And there's also the matter that Obama promised new levels of transparency when he ran for office.
Okay, let's break this down. Obama did promise transparency. He did not promise to reveal the contents of every conversation he or any member of his administration had with anybody for any reason whatsoever. Dickerson's idea that the "stone wall" is all that matters, not what the wall is hiding, is a reductio ad absurdum of this idea. I demand to know the contents of the last five conversations Obama had with Olympia Snowe. I don't care if Robert Gibbs promises they didn't plan anything illegal -- I need to hear it for myself! Also I need to know what, if anything, they ate when they met.
10 comments
In the years not so long ago when Jack Abramoff was running wild, huge numbers of Republicans looked the other way when the scandals surrounding him hit the media. And now that we have a relatively law-abiding Chief Executive in the White House, what is the response from the right? Criminality, scandal, they shout. The Joe Sestak scandal is indeed a non-scandal. Even for the Republicans, the hypocrisy is amazing.
- liberal reformer
May 26, 2010 at 3:06pm
There's no such thing as offering somebody a job in return for them dropping out of a Senate race. The acceptance of a job means dropping out of a Senate race. The concept of offering somebody a job "in exchange" for them declining to seek another job is like offering to marry a woman in exchange for her not marrying some other guy. It's conceptually nonsensical. Alas, not so. I hate to say this, because I too regard this as much ado about very, very little. However, I must point out that, in fact, it IS possible to offer a job to someone in exchange for dropping out of a Senate race. Consider the following two scenarios: 1 - "You're running for the Senate in Pennsylvania. I'd like you to become Secretary of Navy, however. How about it?" 2 - "You're running for the Senate in Pennsylvania. There is an opening for Secratary of the Navy. You should apply. In fact, if you drop out of the race, I can guarantee that the job is yours." "But if I run and win the race, you could still offer me the job? The election is only a few months away, after all." "No. Your application for Secretary of the Navy will only be considered if you drop out of the race now. I promise that your application will be looked on favorably." In 1, there is no exchange, because the offer has been made. In scenario 2, there is, because the job offer is contingent on the prior action of the candidate; ergo, there is an exchange. Again, I don't really care. In fact, such an offer, if made, seems to me like pretty much normal politics, it's not like Sestak isn't qualified for either position. In fact, even Chait's marriage example doesn't compute. I ask Suzy not to marry Tom, and she refuses. I then up the ante by offering to marry her myself if she doesn't marry Tom. I think most people would find the use of the term "exchange" perfectly reasonable here. The only interesting question would be whether there was something underhanded or scurrilous in my desperate attempt to deter Suzy. In the case of Sestak, the answer, as far as I'm concerned, is no.
- timteeter
May 26, 2010 at 3:27pm
Well sure tim - if the administration told Sestak he would not even be *considered for a job if he didn't do what they wanted that would be a problem, but no one is alleging that and that's not what JC is saying in the section you quote. The issue is he is being offered a job - not some kind of political discrimination. Obviously there is some sort of exchange going on every time someone takes a job. When the Yankees signed Mark Teixeira they are paying him for playing for them and not the Red Sox. There's nothing wrong with that.
- NR851651
May 26, 2010 at 4:28pm
Yeah, I don't get Jon's point here either. It's conceptually possible to offer a job as a reward or inducement to drop out of the Senate race. The promise of a WH job sweetens the drop-out option. Without the offer, he doesn't know what's on the other side of dropping out. With it, he does. That would be the point of the offer -- to encourage him to drop out by making life easier when he does.
- jhildner
May 26, 2010 at 6:12pm
Maybe Jon's point is that it can't be illegal because otherwise offering a job to a candidate would always be illegal, because such a scenario always involves dropping out and accepting the job. Does the law prohibit a pragmatic motive in offering the job? Suppose a president appoints a Republican legislator to a cabinet post. One could always argue that the motive must have been, in part anyway, to remove the Republican legislator. I doubt that having some politically pragmatic reasons for doing that is illegal.
- jhildner
May 26, 2010 at 6:19pm
tim, there is no chance that Obama's people expressed it as #2. One, there is no need since it is understood, and two, it would open them up for criminal liability. No one can prove that the obama people offered up the job based soley on the expectation that he would drop out of the race, even Sestak can't prove it (unless he tape recorded the conversations, and they in fact said it that way, which is extremely doubtful because it is so dumb)
- blackton
May 26, 2010 at 7:07pm
Wait, let me see if I understand the rule. All the employees of a company can legally give a politician money in exchange (implicitly) for a particular vote in favor of their company. But if the White House offers a job and its acceptance requires abandoning running for a senate seat, that's illegal. So, the rule is that if you pay money in exchange for political result, no problem. Giving someone a job in exchange for a political result is trouble. But wait, if Al Gore solicited campaign funds on taxpayer funded phones, it violates the law; but if Karl Rove's salary as a White House political consultant is paid with taxpayer dollars, that is okay. The rule must be that Republicans think everything Democrats do is illegal.
- Nusholtz
May 26, 2010 at 7:31pm
I strongly suspect that Sestak will win in November, hence making this all moot (other than as a possible embarrassment on the campaign trail as Republicans assert that Sestak was seen as the weaker candidate by the White House and they tried to entice him out, which is going to seem increasingly irrelevant as he emerges as the stronger candidate). Indeed, this whole storm in a teacup makes me think that the GOP in Penn is afraid of him for the Fall.
- ironyroad
May 26, 2010 at 8:53pm
To irony's point, the brouhaha should be a gold mine for Sestak. First, everyone knows he wasn't the White House's choice. But now with the claim of a job offer, Sestak gets to pose as the guy who stood up to the White House and said "no" to a backroom deal in order to ensure the people of Pennsylvania could have their say at the ballot box. If Sestak can't sell that version of the story, he doesn't deserve to join the U.S. Senate. As to the "scandal" element of it, I don't care what the law is. Nothing that even resembles the alleged facts of the case, even if there was an overt quid pro quo, should be illegal. This kind of horsetrading is as old as the republic, it will always be a part of elected government, and there's nothing corrupt about it. And public embarrassment if an egregious offer is revealed is the only appropriate penalty for anyone to pay for such a thing. Anyone who's bothered about the president of the United States using his power of appointment to affect the makeup of the legislature should come back when they're willing to (A) Denounce Presidents Washington and Lincoln for doing exactly this and (B) Explain why the 50-year-old practice of openly selling ambassadorships to campaign donors is appropriate, but offering jobs to elected officials from the president's own party is not.
- rhubarbs
May 26, 2010 at 11:36pm
I agree that there's no plausible law violation here, and in fact no story except that various media figures seem to be breaking a gut to create one. But... --The comparison with L'Affaire LePlame is apt, because there was neither law-breaking nor a real story there either--just an all-out politico/media effort to create one. When the smoke cleared it became clear that a) Plame couldn't be "outed" because she wasn't covert, and had in fact been listed in public memos as chairing in CIA conferences; b) Joe Wilson was way below the White House radar as a buffoon who's Big Adventure was taken as evidence by the CIA of actual Iraqi probes for yellowcake, whatever he thought, and that no one was likely to "discredit" him more than he was doing himself; the actual leak turned out to be Dick Armitage, who had along with his boss fought hard against the Iraq invasion in-house before finally saluting and following orders when it became inevitable, hardly a part of a plot to sell it. --I think Sestak is going to lose anyway.
- Robert Powell
May 27, 2010 at 10:19am