Bill Clinton talked to Sestak about unpaid job if he dropped bid (Yahoo! News)
Why Republicans and conservatives are so atwitter about this story is beyond me. Yes, it is the kind of behind-the-curtain deal that I don’t think has a place in a democratic political system, but all things being equal this is such a minor issue that the confirmation of it is pretty much punishment enough for the administration. Compare this kind of back-door deal to, say, then-Vice President Dick Cheney meeting in secret with oil industry executives to rewrite our country’s energy policy; look at how well that’sturned out lately. (Don’t get me wrong, though; Obama and his administration deserve a great deal of blame for the tragedy in the Gulf of Mexico, and Obama’s post-explosion handling of it is easily the biggest blunder of his presidency so far.)
Returning to the Democratic Senate Primary in Pennsylvania, though, if anything about this story infuriates and perplexes me, it’s that the administration sent Bill Clinton, of all people, to try to get Joe Sestak out of the primary and give Arlen Specter a clear line to the nomination. Bill Clinton is pretty much the singular face of the Democratic Party’s collapse into the centre of the American political spectrum during his presidency, so trying to use him to convince Sestak, who ran far to Specter’s left (not that that’s a hard thing to do), to drop out of the primary was at best ill-conceived, and more than that was an insult to Sestak and what he was trying to do with his campaign. It’s worth noting, of course, that this plan was hatched by Obama chief of staff Rahm Emanuel, who is a disciple of Clinton/Democratic Leadership Conference centrism. This is a socialist government in action?
The mainstream news outlets, of course, dismissed Sestak’s victory as yet another case of anti-incumbent rage, and focused all their attention on those other candidates who won because of that rage. Since Sestak’s followers didn’t spend the past year shouting racial epithets at congresspeople or carrying firearms at Obama rallies, he doesn’t get any coverage because American news outlets are far more concerned with covering the spectacle of politics than the substance. If the Green Party got as much news coverage in 2000 as the Tea Party has this past calendar year, we would at least have gotten some members elected to the House of Representatives, and possibly the Senate as well. The outrage over Rand Paul’s comments about the Civil Rights Act is the closest thing to intelligent discourse we’ve had in mainstream news in a very long time.
As for how Pennsylvania’s Senate election will shake out, it’s foolish to try to predict a political contest more than five months ahead of time, but my instinct tells me that given Pat Toomey’s experience leading the Club for Growth, if he learned anything from the mistakes the group’s made over the years (which is a very open question), his election, like Rand Paul’s, is his to lose, especially since Obama has done so little to motivate the Democratic base, and after his missteps in the Gulf he may simply be unable to do that before November. I haven’t heard of Toomey doing anything that could provoke the kind of outrage Rand Paul’s comments have, although I wouldn’t put it past him. This election, like so many others in America, isn’t going to come down to who has the better ideas, but who has the most money and who can shout the loudest. Why don’t we just elect that guy from the Staples commercials president now and get it over with?