Well, OK, not exactly; but given that people are now defending the White House’s job offer to Rep. Joe Sestak by reminding us that the Reagan White House may have tried something similar in California with Sen. S. I. Hayakawa 28 years ago, I think this from James’ entry on Brewers Hall of Famer Robin Yount in his New Historical Baseball Abstract is very much on point:
In 1978, after Yount had been in the major leagues four years, he held out in the spring, mulling over whether he wanted to be a baseball player, or whether he really wanted to be a professional golfer.
When that happened, I wrote him off as a player who would never become a star. If he can’t even figure out whether he wants to be a baseball player or a golfer, I reasoned, he’s never going to be an outstanding player. . . .
But as soon as he returned to baseball, Yount became a better player than he had been before; his career got traction from the moment he returned. What I didn’t see at the time was that Yount was in the process of making a commitment to baseball. Before he had his golf holiday, he was there every day, but on a certain level he wasn’t participating; he was wondering whether this was really the sport that he should be playing. What looked like indecision or sulking was really the process of making a decision.
This is often true. What Watergate was about was not the corruption of government, as most people thought, but rather, the establishment of new and higher standards of ethical conduct. Almost all scandals, I think, result not from the invention of new evils, but from the imposition of new ethical standards. . . . In the biographies of men and nations, success often arrives in a mask of failure.
I think James’ argument is well-taken, and very much applicable to the Sestak scandal. The irony of it all is that the new ethical standards that the Obama White House is now resisting, with some help from a press corps that really doesn’t much want to go after them, are the product of the Obama campaign. The people now insisting that politics as usual is “perfectly appropriate” are the same people who were telling us two years ago that we needed to vote for Sen. Obama because politics as usual is unacceptable. Maybe it was unrealistic then; it still looks bad for them now. As the Wall Street Journal summed the matter up,
It’s possible that all we really have here is a case of the Obama White House playing Washington politics as usual, which the White House refused to admit for three months because this is what Mr. Obama promised he would not do if he became President. However, this is clearly what he hired Mr. Emanuel to do for him, and given his ethical record Mr. Clinton was the perfect political cutout. So much for the most transparent Administration in history.
Then again, George W. Bush merely exercised his right to fire a handful of U.S. Attorneys, and Democrats made that a federal case for years even though it has since gone nowhere legally. The Emanuel to Clinton to Sestak job offer still needs a scrub under oath by the Justice Department and the relevant Congressional committees.
I believe the phrase we were looking for here is “hoist with their own petard.”