If you believe that headlines, only the Bush Administration acted this way...

The political media organization, Politico, last night reported that the Office of Special Counsel has determined that the Bush Administration’s Office of Political Affairs violated the Hatch Act which prohibits federal employees from engaging in political activities while at their jobs. The 118 page report, states, “The entire [Office of Political Affairs] staff was enlisted in pursuit of Republican success at the polls and many OPA employees believed that effort was part of their official job duties,” the report concludes. “Based on the extent of the activities described below, OSC concludes that the political activities of OPA employees were not incidental to their official functions, and thus U.S. Treasury funds were unlawfully used to finance efforts to pursue Republican victories at the polls in 2006.”

What did they expect? The Office of Political Affairs paid attention to the political activities of the President’s party and worked to increase the number of Republican members of Congress. That doesn’t seem like too big of an issue. As a political appointee within the Bush Administration, I was briefed on the Hatch Act and what I could do with respect to political activities. I was not allowed to communicate with a campaign’s staff, only the elected officials official government staff. My office worked with numerous elected officials to set up official visits by Commerce Secretary Gutierrez to districts across the country. Part of the purpose of the visit was to provide press coverage of the visit. These visits typically highlighted a policy initiative that the Administration believed was important.

Following the 2006 election that saw the Democrats take control of Congress, our office received a request from Rep. Henry Waxman for all communication with Congressional offices to ensure that our office did not violate the Hatch Act. The request was incredibly general and from our perspective was just a fishing expedition to try and find something wrong with the Bush Administration. Every time the Secretary traveled domestically, the Office of Legislative and Intergovernmental Affairs notified the local elected officials of the visit and invited them or a representative to join the Secretary at the event. It is true that we often went to Republican districts, we visited districts that made the most sense for advocating the policy positions held by the Administration. We were so concerned with following the Hatch Act that the Department’s Deputy General Counsel attended the strategy meetings that were held each week to discuss potential travel opportunities. When we had a visit that included a political aspect, staff was not able to attend the meeting/event. For example, we put together a visit to Connecticut to visit then Representative Nancy Johnson. The visit started off with a lunch speech to a local chamber of commerce and was followed with a tour of a local chocolate company. Following the site visit, the Secretary left to go to a fundraiser and those of us traveling with him went to the airport to catch a flight back to DC. The funny thing about this visit, on the flight from DC to Connecticut, the House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi was on our flight with three staff to go do political events for the candidate running against Representative Johnson.

Everyone on both sides of the isle that works in DC pays attention to the political implications of the activities that they engage in. Politics is what the city is all about. Cabinet officials travel across the country promoting their political agenda. One of the ways that they do this is to support potential candidates that share the same point of view. They try and get officials elected that will help advance their political agenda. Why is it that only now, with a then Democratically controlled congress that the Office of Special Counsel determined that the Bush Office of Political Affairs violated the Hatch Act? Is it just a coincidence that the week before the release of the report, the Obama Administration announced that they were transferring the Office of Political Affairs to the Democratic National Committee? So all the press reports over the past two years about Patrick Gaspard and his office at the White House was just hypothetical? Mr. Gaspard wasn’t involved in advising President Obama on certain travel proposals to help Democratic candidates? So Mr. Gaspard wasn’t the reason that the President went to Massachusetts a year ago to campaign against now Senator Scott Brown? Political considerations didn’t go into the planning of the President’s schedule? If you believe that, there is a bridge in Brooklyn that Iwould like to sell you…

If you just believed the press headlines, you probably missed an important sentence, “the investigators also found that previous White Houses engaged in similar political activities. “The aspects of OPA that came in conflict with the Hatch Act during the Bush II administration have apparently existed for decades,” the report says.” You are never going to get rid of javascript:void(0)politics in DC and almost always, the reason for official travel is to impact the political debate. Administrations of both parties are trying to improve their position in DC and one of the ways to do that is to travel across the country and do press events with elected officials that share the same point of view.