Business as usual

Most people assumed it was secretary of the Navy. For those keeping notes, an
appointment to become secretary of the Navy is not worth a chance to knock off
Arlen Specter, at least not at the current market rates.

This morning, a writer for the left-wing opinion site Slate, Joe Conason,
opined that what the White House offered was probably illegal.

Give Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele credit. He has
single-handedly made this business-as-usual-probably-illegal job offer an issue
that the media is going to try to ignore as best it can until it can no longer
ignore it anymore.

Mr. Will is right. For this White House, this is business as usual. But Mr.
Conason is also right. It is probably illegal.

So for the White House, they have a problem. Their business as usual is
probably illegal.

What Rahm Emanuel or whoever offered the job to Sestak did was probably well
within the tradition of Chicago politics. You offer this guy something here,
and he goes away. You offer that guy something there, and he becomes a friend
for life. In Chicago, it is called machine politics. But, increasingly,
according to Justice Department investigators, this kind of machine politics is
called corruption. And the City of Chicago political machine has been under
such constant surveillance from the feds that city pols use some of the same
tactics as the Mafia to avoid being wiretapped.

It was funny watching former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich (D) make an
appearance on “Celebrity Apprentice” last night. He would know something about
how this game works (or doesn’t work, in his case). His offense — to auction
off President Obama’s Senate seat to the highest bidder — really isn’t that
much different from what the White House did with Joe Sestak. Instead of
demanding campaign contributions in exchange for the seat, the White House
offered a plum government job to a problem politician in exchange for that guy
not running for a seat.

To Sestak’s credit, he said thanks but no thanks. But it can’t make the congressman
happy that this story of run-of-the-mill corruption is now permanently
attaching to his name, just as his voting record is permanently attached to the
Obama White House. He may not have taken a job from the president, but that
doesn’t mean he doesn’t take his marching orders from him. In fact, he has
voted in lockstep with the Obama administration on every big vote of the last
two years.

Business as usual? Maybe. But that doesn’t make it right.

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