The hint of a White House bribe helped U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak in the Democratic primary for the Pennsylvania US Senate seat. But it will be a liability in the general election. In an environment of massive anti-incumbent sentiment, it was advantageous to Sestak to differentiate himself from the self-serving Arlen Specter, who had switched parties to gain Obama’s sponsorship in hopes of saving his place in the Senate. One does not reach a high level in the military without being socially and politically prudent, and Sestak rose to the rank of three-star Admiral. He was also street-savvy enough to win two terms in Congress after that. Yet one can understand how he was tempted to let the story of the White House job offer, purportedly made last July, slip during the taping of a mid-February public affairs television show.
U.S. Rep. Joe Sestak … stands behind his contention that the Obama administration offered him a federal job if he would back away from a Democratic primary race against Sen. Arlen Specter.
“Yes, I was offered a job,” Sestak said….
Sestak said top party officials urged him to abandon his Senate bid when Specter joined the Democratic Party….
“Look, I am comfortable that I answered honestly,” Sestak said. “I said I would never agree with the type of deal that was done with Specter, so I would never go for a deal for myself.”
As early as last June, establishment Democrats were lining up against his then unannounced candidacy.
The public mulling of a Senate bid by Sestak – a retired admiral who’s just begun his second term in the House – is giving heartburn to many influential Democrats in Washington and in the Keystone State. Democratic leaders painstakingly worked to recruit Specter, potentially the Democrats’ filibuster-breaking 60th vote in the Senate, under the assumption that the former Republican would be able to coast through his adopted party’s primary on his way to another term.
Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell personified the great disconnect between Democratic incumbants and public sentiment, and proved himself a dismal prognosticator, when he assumed a loss for Sestak last June:
Gov. Ed Rendell (D) offered especially blunt words against a Sestak candidacy, telling MSNBC that “Joe should not run for the Senate in the Democratic primary. He would get killed. … [If] Joe Sestak runs against Arlen Specter, he is out of the Congress after just two short terms. We will lose a terrific Congressman and when he loses to Arlen, he fades into political obscurity.”
Now Sestak has handily won the primary, and the spectre of Specter has instead faded into political obscurity. Within Democratic circles, Sestak is diametrically opposed to the incumbent administration. He was a Hillary Clinton supporter. And there is a more painful fact, one that most political pundits overlook — Obama’s minion Admiral Michael Mullen, currently Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was responsible for ending Sestak’s 31-year naval career.
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