The Pennsylvania Senate Race Follies - Ryan John

The Pennsylvania Senate campaign has gotten pretty interesting. First of all, it was surprising that Arlen Specter wanted another term after 44 years as a Senator. At 80, he’s pretty old, has battled cancer, and has taken enough criticism and praise during his public service to last ten lifetimes. I would think he might have wanted to enjoy his old age and success for a while. But apparently he wanted it so bad that he was willing to change his political affiliation again (he switched from Democrat to Republican while running for district attorney of Philadelphia in 1965, and then back to a Democrat last year) just for another potential term. He seriously jeopardized his political legacy in the process. Even though he received the White House endorsement, he still went on to lose last month.

There was a lot of buzz surrounding his primary opponent, Democrat Joe Sestak, whose navy career was called into question by the Specter camp. Sestak claimed to have received a job offer from the White House in exchange for agreeing not to run against fellow Democrat Specter in the primary. Sestak used the potential White House controversy to his advantage and went on to beat the veteran Senator.

Now people want to know the “who, what, where, when, and why” of the White House job offer. The people of Pennsylvania are rightly wondering about Sestak’s integrity before they go into the voting booth in November. And the American people should be interested to know their federal government may be secretly using such tactics to cherry-pick Senators. This is something that can’t be talked out or dismissed by, say, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs (shown above), who denies all these claims. Either Sestak fabricated the job offer to reclaim an honorable image that was potentially damaged over his Navy discharge; or the White House staff is trying to pull some strings they shouldn’t be pulling.

And was that part of the deal when Specter supported Obama’s stimulus package in 2008? We’ll never know if Specter was being an Obama puppet to gain his endorsement, but at least we should know if a job offer was made to Sestak. If it was, we have a serious problem in the White House when a man whose main campaign theme was Change is digging the political-credibility hole even deeper. My guess is, from now until November, this controversy will continue to brew, but that Sestak will not provide any further information regarding the alleged White House job offer and ultimate damage his credibility. Therefore he’ll lose in November to the very conservative, standing-to-the-right-of-Rick-Santorum, Republican Pat Toomey.