The Romanoff Sestak Scandal

http://www.futureofcapitalism.com/2010/03/the-romanoff-sestak-scandal

If you can make it past all the breathless references to Watergate and "White House Felonies," (admittedly a big "if"), this American Spectator article on what it calls "Jobsgate" is actually pretty intriguing. It's about how the Obama administration offered a Pennsylvania congressman, Joe Sestak, and a Colorado politician, Andrew Romanoff, government jobs if they would not pursue their primary challenges to incumbent Democratic senators. The article also discusses how the administration has subsequently resisted queries about what happened in each case.

FutureOfCapitalism.com tends to recoil from efforts to criminalize politics. Winning a presidential election, which Barack Obama did, gives him the power to appoint people he chooses to executive branch jobs, no matter what Senator Schumer would have had us believe back during the Bush-era U.S. attorneys "scandal." But we also think that competition in politics is a good thing (witness the problems of New York, a one-party state.) Whether it is criminal or not, it's not particularly attractive to see the Obama administration using executive branch jobs as currency to deny Democratic primary voters a choice of candidates. How parties choose candidates is up to the parties themselves, but the use of taxpayer-funded jobs as a tool to weed out the field of candidates is something that might reasonably concern non-Democrats as well.

by Ira Stoll  |  Mar 17, 2010 at 9:45 am Related Topics:  New York, Politics, President Obama, Press, Senator Schumer receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free futureofcapitalism.com mailing list