Obama Citizenship

The Romanoff Scandal: Obama ?Unaware? of Three Job Offers

By Phil

Andrew Romanoff now admits that he was actually offered three positions by the Obama Administration (via excellent Jake Tapper reporting):

Romanoff also released what he said was an e-mail from White House deputy chief of staff Jim Messina outlining three possible jobs ? deputy assistant administrator for Latin America and Caribbean for the U.S. Agency for International Development; director of the Office of Democracy and Governance at USAID; and director of the U.S. Trade and Development Agency ? he could have if he didn?t run.

Romanoff did not accept any of the offers, and currently is challenging Bennet, who has the endorsement of President Obama.

Yet, the AP says that Obama was “unaware … ahead of time” that such offers were being made. In fact, Press Secretary Gibbs went on to say that it was actually White House Deputy Chief of Staff Jim Messina who made the contact to Romanoff for the purposes of avoiding a primary challenge (emphases HotAir):

In a statement released early this morning, WH Press Sec. Robert Gibbs said the WH had done nothing wrong. ?Andrew Romanoff applied for a position at USAID during the Presidential transition. He filed this application through the Transition on-line process. After the new administration took office, he followed up by phone with White House personnel,? Gibbs said. ?Jim Messina called and emailed Romanoff last September to see if he was still interested in a position at USAID, or if, as had been reported, he was running for the US Senate. ? Messina wanted to determine if it was possible to avoid a costly battle between two supporters.?

HotAir (with their emphasis) opines:

If the White House has been offering people paid jobs in the administration in order to ?avoid costly battles? in primaries, then that breaks the law.  The allegations surrounding their dealings with Joe Sestak and Romanoff have been all along that the White House attempted to buy off primary challengers to Democratic incumbents in Senate races.  Far from establishing that there has been no wrongdoing, the statement confirms the allegations.

Here’s Politico’s take:

Taken together, the Sestak and Romanoff cases suggest a White House team that is one part Dick Daley, one part Barney Fife.

They undercut the Obama?s reputation on two fronts. Trying to put the fix in to deny Democratic voters the chance to choose for themselves who their Senate nominees should be is hardly consistent with the idea of ?Yes we can? grassroots empowerment that is central to Obama?s brand.

And bungling that fix is at odds with the Obama team?s image?built around the likes of Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, David Plouffe and Obama himself?as shrewd political operatives who know the game and always win it.

More to the point:

Did Obama ever know that these jobs were available to be offered by his staff for the obvious purposes of fixing the election process (and taking the primaries out of the hands of the rank-and-file Democrats in the process)? How else would his staff know that these positions were available?

You see, having jobs available, in general, is not wrong. The problem is when the intent becomes to affect the political process with such offerings. And if it were as simple as this, one would think that one/all parties would have simply admitted as such a long time ago.

Also, why didn’t these guys bite? Granted, there’s more power in writing legislation; I get that. But let’s just assume — let’s just assume — that there have been more job offers to more candidates that had been in the pipeline. Why haven’t there been any takers? (Or, maybe there have been; we just don’t know about them yet)

I still wonder why it was that Joe Sestak opened his mouth in the first place. As far as anyone knows, if he would have simply kept quiet, none of this would have made the news. Did he have a guilty conscience bigger than Chicago thuggery could control?

See the Impeachment category for general background on this story.

-Phil

Email: phil [at] therightsideoflife [dot] com

Subscribe via RSS feed and/or email updatesSimilar Posts:

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Full post as published by The Right Side of Life on June 03, 2010 (boomark / email).