Weiner: Sestak, White House need to come clean on job offer

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) offers the White House a little free — and intelligent — advice today on MS-NBC’s Morning Joe. The longer the press keeps talking about the job offer that Rep. Joe Sestak (D-PA) has now repeatedly assured the media that they made to entice him not to run against Arlen Specter in the Senate primary, the less Sestak can say to fight Pat Toomey in the general election. Weiner assumes that there is less here than meets the eye, and suggests that Sestak’s repeated assurances that the Obama White House offered what amounted to a flat-out bribe to interfere in Pennsylvania’s choice for a Democratic nominee may just be Sestak’s method of branding himself as an independent:

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Er, sure. Sestak certainly couldn’t come up with any other evidence of his independence in the Meet the Press interview with David Gregory:

MR. GREGORY: Congressman, you sound like the ultimate outsider. The only problem is you are a congressman. OK? You were running against the establishment.

REP. SESTAK: Ah.

MR. GREGORY: You voted for TARP, for the bailout. You voted for the president’s stimulus plan. You voted for the president’s healthcare plan. Exactly which establishment are you not part of, that you’re running against?

REP. SESTAK: You know, I–31 years in the Navy, as you know, when I came to Washington, I was kind of taken aback that that type of accountability that I’d learned from my actions in the U.S. Navy seemed to be absent down here in Washington, D.C. Look, somebody had torpedoed our economy. We were sinking. We had to caulk the holes. We were hemorrhaging jobs. It’s not about big government or small government, it’s about effective government. Somebody took the referee off the football field up there on Wall Street, they let them play roulette with the savings of the seniors in my district. I sit there, and to what is to Wall Street a market correction now means young couples can’t afford to send their children to education. I ran about accountability for one’s actions, and I think that’s not…

MR. GREGORY: But, Congressman…

REP. SESTAK: …pretty absent down here.

MR. GREGORY: Congressman, the question I asked you is you have supported all the major elements of the Obama agenda.

REP. SESTAK: Yes.

MR. GREGORY: And yet you, in that sound bite, were running as an outsider. Are you not part of the establishment that you are railing against?

REP. SESTAK: Oh, I did vote for those because they were needed. But as John F. Kennedy once said, sometimes the party asks too much. And when they did something that I didn’t agree with because it didn’t help Pennsylvania working families, I’ll stand up to the party. That’s what I did. It doesn’t mean whether you’re part of an establishment or not. It’s whether you stand up for what’s right.

MR. GREGORY: Well, which, which element of the Obama agenda that was his priority did you stand up to?

REP. SESTAK: Oh, I did–I honestly think that this president has done great, good things. But I don’t think we’ve gone far enough in terms of helping small business.

With that kind of weak answer, no small wonder Sestak wants to highlight the alleged bribe attempt, or perhaps exaggerate it. Meanwhile, Andrew Malcolm notes that a complete investigation has exonerated the White House from any wrongdoing … an investigation conducted by the White House, natch:

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, CBS’ Bob Schieffer asked Obama press secretary Robert “The Artful Dodger” Gibbs about the Sestak offer.

Here’s that exchange:

SCHIEFFER: One final question. Joe Sestak, who beat Arlen Specter — and the White House, of course, was backing Arlen Specter in the Pennsylvania primary up there — all these reports that the White House offered him some sort of job, some sort of post in the administration if he wouldn’t run. Would you tell us what — what post he was offered?

GIBBS: Well, Bob, I’m not a lawyer. But lawyers in the White House and others have looked into conversations that were had with Congressman Sestak. And nothing inappropriate happened.

I think Republicans are continuing to dredge this up because, if you look just a couple of days after this primary, the polling shows that Republicans are already behind in a very important Senate race.

SCHIEFFER: Improper or not, did you offer him a job in the administration?

GIBBS: I’m not going to get further into what the conversations were. People that have looked into them assure me that they weren’t inappropriate in any way.

SCHIEFFER: Robert Gibbs, thank you very much for being with us.

And that didn’t end the questions? Heck, that doesn’t even satisfy Anthony Weiner.

Update: Deleted the second video; that seems to have solved the formatting errors.

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