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Sestak’s rough sailing at Pa. Press Club

Joe Sestak tried to break bread Monday with a few captains of industry, or at least their policy watchdogs. With such a dynamic at work, one can only imagine how the Pennsylvania Press Club luncheon turned out: a little too dyspeptic.

Pan to the Hilton Harrisburg ballroom, where in front of the Democratic Senate candidate there sat entire tables filled with business leaders whose faces were set like stone, their arms clenched across their chests.

With body language like that, who needed air conditioning?

Still, Sestak sailed full-speed ahead, trying to persuade the audience he’s not the “Nancy Pelosi-liberal” that Republican opponent Pat Toomey declares him to be.

“If you are committed to an ideology, you can’t change course,” Sestak said.

He took exception to the charge that he’s in lockstep with Nancy Pelosi.

“I didn’t agree with Speaker Pelosi when she backed Arlen Specter,” Sestak joked.

Better to get off the subject of the House Speaker and point out the differences between himself and Toomey, the former three-term congressman from the Lehigh Valley.

Sestak, a second-term Delaware County congressman, painted himself as a leader who seeks pragmatic solutions.

Toomey, meanwhile, is a former banker who “has dedicated his life” to dealing the kind of “exotic financial instruments” that helped sink the economy, Sestak said.

“My opponent believes what’s good for Wall Street is good for Main Street… despite all the evidence to the contrary… that prosperity trickles down,” Sestak said.

These are largely uncharted waters for Sestak, who has had to change his tune since defeating Specter in the Democratic primary.

Sestak won largely because he was able to paint Specter as an opportunist. What was unnecessary material in that primary fight was the fact that Sestak and Specter shared voting records on many issues Democrats care about, including the $787 billion stimulus package.

Now, with such clear ideological differences in play, Sestak’s tactics and message have had to change, while Toomey has been able to stay on message, hammering the government bailouts and stimulus and the passage of health care reform legislation.

This has put Sestak in the position of having to face withering criticism from conservative voters who will use the deficit and Congress’ votes on bailouts and stimulus as a prime litmus test.

This is an area where Specter had pretty clearly defined his response, saying a vote for those bailouts was a vote to keep the country from sinking into another Great Depression.

It’s a message Sestak would do well to appropriate, given the mash-up he delivered Monday when he was asked about the federal bailouts.

Pennsylvania Manufacturers’ Association board member David Taylor asked for an accounting of those bailouts.

Confronting the critical inquiry, Sestak ended his answer with an analogy about how the economy had been torpedoed and was sinking and “we had to caulk holes.”

The man who asked, however, was utterly unmoved.

“His direct answer was incomprehensible and then it disintegrated into baby talk about the house being on fire,” Taylor said.

The fact is, it’s not exactly clear what Sestak meant, which is a problem.

Fiscal conservatives are eager to connect all the watery dots of the bailouts and stimulus spending and link them to the impending implosions of state and local economies.

They’re eager to make a case that it’s not the failure and abuses of an unregulated “free” market that has imperiled the economy, but Nancy Pelosi liberals who think all big business is bad business.

“The market is like a kidney,” Taylor said. “It sorts out what’s good and bad, but you lose that market function when businesses that should have been allowed to fail are bailed out.”

Sestak said he aims to reach across the ideological divide.

“I’m not saying I changed anyone’s mind, but I saw a few nods,” he said.

Don’t know where he was looking.

July 27, 2010 at 9:40 am

--Laura Vecsey

Tags: Joe Sestak

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