Hint to Liberal Commentators: Sestak Scandal Not About Sestak
So I’ve read a number of pieces on the emerging Sestak job-offer controversy and I think everyone’s missing the point. No, offering Sestak a job wasn’t illegal. Good to know. Yes, however, it is a real scandal. (Sorry, Digby)
It’s just not a scandal about Sestak. I mean, seriously. Since when is it a bad thing to be offered a job? (Especially in this economy)
The problem here concerns the other end of this conversation, our wishy-washy President Obama. Once again: no, it isn’t the obvious thing, that he offered a Senatorial candidate a job to try and usher him out of the race. Yes, that is standard-issue, sleazy political horsetrading.
The scandal is that Obama did this to protect a slimy, self-important egotistical political opportunist like Arlen ‘Which Way is the Wind Blowing’ Specter. Protect him from a primary, in which he was heading for defeat by, and get this — an ACTUAL Democrat. (It turns out, actual Democrats are more popular with Democratic voters. Who knew?)
Put more succinctly, the scandal here is not that it was illegal, or even that the way we conduct politics in this country reeks like an overflowing cesspool, but that the head of the Democratic party has so little respect for his own party’s voters and process that he’d swoop in to try and coax a real Democrat like Sestak out of a race against a freshly minted turncoat like Specter. That’s the scandal; that he thinks so very, very little of Democratic voters and their ideals, and proves it almost every single day.
Congratulations are in order for Pennsylvania Democrats; they demanded better in their candidate, and for once, they got it.
In spite of President Obama.