In all the talk about whether a White House job was or was not offered to Pennsylvania Rep. Joe Sestak if he would drop out of his state’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, we’ve lost touch with the first story along these lines.
Last week, however, it’s returned to the headlines.
Anonymous sources in the Obama administration confirmed to The Associated Press today that the White House “dangled the possibility of a job” to former Colorado House Speaker Andrew Romanoff if he would not file for the Democratic nomination against U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet.
Denver Post syndicated columnist David Harsanyi resurrected the story on Friday, noting that even though Romanoff had not filed for office when the purported offer was made, the language of the law suggests that any attempt to, well, bribe, a potential candidate could be illegal.
My former Rocky Mountain News colleague Mike Littwin, a liberal columnist who now toils for The Post, thinks Sestak-gate is no big deal. And Romanoff-gate shouldn’t be.
But why, Littwin asks, will Romanoff not only not talk about the story — first reported in the Post last September — but why does he refuse to talk about why he won’t talk about it?
Romanoff’s principal campaign issue has been that Bennet is a creature of Washington and of big money, whose demands he cannot resist. And that’s pretty much it. Romanoff, who has spent his political life touting his ability to compromise, now presents himself as someone unwilling to compromise a principle and always willing to take the tough, non-political stand on any issue.
Romanoff’s campaign is an open book ? unless, I guess, that whole transparency thing just becomes too inconvenient.
The AP notes, “Bennet has outpaced Romanoff in fundraising and support from Washington, although party activists attending the state party assembly last month favored the challenger by a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent.”
Bennet, the former superintendent of Denver schools, was appointed by Gov. Bill Ritter to replace the popular Ken Salazar when Salazar was named Obama’s secretary of the interior. And oddly enough, Bennet had been considered the frontrunner to become Obama’s education secretary before the president picked Arne Duncan for the job.
