My Gulf Coast Blues: Jack Spicer's "The Day Five Thousand Fish Died Along the Charles River"

So they sent Bill Clinton last summer to offer Rep. Joe Sestak an advisory job in the Obama Administration if he would drop out of the PA Democratic Senate Primary Race against Arlen Specter. Mr. Sestak would have won by an even more resounding majority if the news below had broken sooner. Obama never ceases to amaze me with his likeness to Herbert Hoover.

Meanwhile, I feel like I'm trapped in a planetary version of Luis Bunuel's "The Exterminating Angel," with no one able to leave the party or change the conventions that are crushing the life out of them. No food in the pantry; so eat each other.

Yesterday while driving home I listened to an oil expert worry that this oil spill might set back drilling for decades--compounding this disaster with an even worse one. Is it fair, he argued, to hold the equivalent of one Chernobyl against an entire industry?

No one seems to have asked--not even the whimpering Louisiana congressmen on TV last night whose childhood fishing ground is gone forever--whether a CHERNOBYL WAS NEEDED IN THE FIRST PLACE. What does it say about our 'standard' of living that we must drill for oil one miles below the surface of the ocean using untested technology that cannot be controlled if it fails? No one has yet asked a single question in any press conference I have watched about reforming the scale of living, or redefining the norms of individual energy consumption and resource use. The party will continue, that's the message I'm hearing. And Mr. Obama intends to host it for another seven years.

As a writer long familiar with jewelry industry despoiling of ocean bed and mine field, I see BP's escapade as the latest chapter for a book called 'Blood Oil.' Only we don't see it that way because the victims are fish and fowl, flora and fauna. Last night, as I watched footage of a bird cleanup, I had this horrible image that BP had gone on a rampage--tarring every feathered thing in its omnidirectional, omnivorous path.

There's a Jack Spicer poem written while he lived in Boston in 1955 that deserves to be read in defiant as well as elegiac conjunction with this catastrophe. It's right up there with Bessie Smith's "Back Water Blues" started in a rowboat during the 1927 New Orleans flood.

THE DAY FIVE THOUSAND FISH DIED ALONG THE CHARLES RIVER

And when the fish come in to die

They slap their heads against the rocks until they float

Downstream on one dead eye. From rocks

The Irish boys yell and throw rocks at them and

beat them with their sticks.

Gulls wheel in the fine sky. Tall as an ogre

God walks among the rocks. His angels cry,

"Yell and throw rocks at them and beat them

with sticks!"

But watch their upturned eyes

That gleam like God's own candles in the sun. Nothing

Deserves to live

--Jack Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me: The Collected Poetry, Wesleyan, 2008, page 56

May 28, 2010, 10:14 AM

White House Used Bill Clinton to Ask Sestak to Drop Out of Race

By PETER BAKER

H. Rumph Jr./Associated PressPresident Bill Clinton with Joe Sestak, and his wife, Susan, in 2006, when Mr. Sestak was running for the House of Representatives.

President Obama’s chief of staff used former President Bill Clinton as an intermediary to see if Representative Joe Sestak would drop out of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Senate primary if given a prominent, but unpaid, advisory position, the White House said on Friday.

Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff, asked Mr. Clinton last summer to explore “options of service” on a presidential or senior government advisory board with Mr. Sestak, the White House said in a statement. Mr. Sestak said no and went on to win last week’s primary against Senator Arlen Specter.

The White House disputed Republican claims that the conversations might be illegal or improper. “There was no such impropriety,” Robert F. Bauer, the White House counsel, said in a memo released to reporters. “The Democratic Party leadership had a legitimate interest in averting a divisive primary fight and a similarly legitimate concern about the congressman vacating his seat in the House.”

Mr. Bauer went on to say that such horse-trading has been commonplace through history. “There have been numerous, reported instances in the past when prior administrations – both Democratic and Republican, and motivated by the same goals – discussed alternative paths to service for qualified individuals also considering campaigns for public office,” he wrote. “Such discussions are fully consistent with the relevant law and ethical requirements.”

Representative Darrell Issa of California, the senior Republican on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the interactions described by the White House “represent an illegal quid pro quo,” even if the position was unpaid. “It is abundantly clear that this kind of conduct is contrary to President Obama’s pledge to change ‘business as usual’ and that his administration has engaged in the kind of political shenanigans he once campaigned to end.”

Federal law makes it a crime for anyone “who directly or indirectly, promises any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or any other benefit” to someone else “as consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of or opposition to any candidate or any political party in connection with any general or special election to any political office.” It is also illegal for a government official to use “his official authority for the purpose of interfering with, or affecting, the nomination or the election of any candidate” for Senate.

While many have speculated that the White House offered to appoint Mr. Sestak as secretary of the Navy, Mr. Bauer said that was never the case. The White House did not offer Mr. Sestak a full-time paid position because Mr. Emanuel wanted him to stay in the House rather than risk losing his seat, so he considered “uncompensated advisory board options.”

The White House did not disclose what those options were, but people briefed on the matter said one option was an appointment to the president’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a panel of prominent Americans outside government who provide independent oversight of the nation’s spy apparatus and advise the president. But White House officials discovered that it would not work because Mr. Sestak could not serve on the board while still serving in Congress.

In a statement Friday, Mr. Sestak said Mr. Clinton had conveyed Mr. Emanuel’s suggestion that he join a “presidential board” while remaining in the House, but he declined. “I told President Clinton that my only consideration in getting into the Senate race or not was whether it was the right thing to do for Pennsylvania working families and not any offer,” Mr. Sestak said. “The former president said he knew I’d say that, and the conversation moved on to other subjects.”

Mr. Sestak first mentioned publicly in February that he had been offered a job but provided no details, and the White House for three months had refused to discuss it, generating intense criticism from Republicans who accused it of trying to bribe a congressman and deep consternation among Democrats who called on the administration to answer questions.

Mr. Emanuel was eager last summer to clear the way to this year’s Democratic Senate nomination for Mr. Specter, who had just left the Republican party, and to bolster Democrats’ majority in the Senate. Mr. Sestak, a retired admiral and two-term House member, was already planning a run.

In tapping Mr. Clinton as the go-between, Mr. Emanuel picked the party’s most prominent figure other than Mr. Obama and someone Mr. Sestak had worked for on the National Security Council in the 1990s. Mr. Sestak endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton against Mr. Obama in the 2008 presidential primaries, and Mr. Clinton was one of the first to call to congratulate him on his Senate victory last week.

Mr. Clinton was at the White House on Thursday to have lunch with Mr. Obama and join him in greeting the American men’s World Cup soccer team heading to South Africa.

As chief of staff and previously as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Mr. Emanuel has not been shy about trying to steer party nominations to those he considers the stronger candidates. The White House under Mr. Emanuel has also leaned on Gov. David Paterson of New York to drop out of this year’s gubernatorial race, which he eventually did under a cloud of scandal. Mr. Emanuel’s deputy, Jim Messina, suggested a possible administration job to Andrew Romanoff to get him to not challenge Sen. Michael Bennet in a Colorado primary, The Denver Post has reported, citing unnamed sources.

Whether that constitutes ordinary political horse-trading or crosses a legal line has been debated in Washington for months. Democrats and some Republicans have said it is hardly unusual for presidents to offer political appointments to clear the way for allies. But Republicans have suggested such actions may constitute a crime.

Mr. Issa and all seven Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have asked the Justice Department to appoint a special prosecutor. The Justice Department wrote Mr. Issa last week that it did not need a special prosecutor to investigate if it chose to do so. Government officials, who asked not to be identified discussing legal decisions, said that neither the Justice Department nor the Office of Special Counsel, an agency that looks at violations of the Hatch Act governing the political conduct of federal employees, is investigating.

While declining to discuss what happened, Mr. Obama on Thursday said, “I can assure the public that nothing improper took place.”