The question of whether the White House offered Joe Sestak a job - possibly illegally - to drop his primary challenge to Arlen Specter is not going away. Last Thursday Robert Gibbs pulled off a remarkably uncomfortable feat of dodging 13 consecutive questions on the matter.

On Sunday, Gibbs assured the public on Face the Nation that he looked into the matter and is confident "nothing inappropriate took place" - a response that was lampooned rather amusingly by the Los Angeles Times with the title: Obama White House probe of Obama White House finds no Obama White House impropriety on Sestak.

And today, David Axelrod did his own version of the Sestak Two-Step, reiterating Gibbs "nothing inappropriate" line to Chuck Todd.

As Peter Baker points out in a newly published piece in the New York Times, the White House's effort to defuse the story has fallen flat and also puts the administration in the embarrassing position of arguing that the best case scenario is that they were simply doing "business as usual" in Washington DC:

Even if the conversations were perfectly legal, as the White House claims, the situation still challenges President Obama's attempts to present himself as a reformer who will rid the town of dirty politics. Refusing even to discuss what was discussed does not advance the Obama White House's claim to be “the most transparent” in history. [snip]

Indeed, Douglas B. Sosnik, who was the White House political director under President Bill Clinton, said that using jobs to reward political friends is simply “business as usual.” But, he added, that is the problem: Mr. Obama promised not to perpetuate business as usual. “It cuts against the Obama brand,” Mr. Sosnik said. “The public tolerance for these deals is less than in the past.”

Ron Kaufman, who was White House political director under President George H.W. Bush, said it would not be surprising for a White House to use political appointments to accomplish a political goal. “Tell me a White House that didn't do this, back to George Washington,” he said. “But here's the difference: The times have changed, and the ethics have changed, and the scrutiny has changed. This is the kind of thing people across America are mad about.”

Moreover, he said, Mr. Obama's own rhetoric raised the bar: “When you get out there and say we're going to do things totally different, we're above all this and we're going to be totally transparent, they cause their own problem because they're not being transparent.”

With public trust in government at an all time low, the White House's "trust us" response to the Sestak matter simply isn't going to cut it. If nothing inappropriate happened, as both Gibbs and Axelrod asserted, the White House should bite the bullet and reveal the details, no matter how embarrassing they might be in the short term. Otherwise, it's hard to see how this issue just disappears into the ether.

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