Teddy Partridge over at firedoglake asks why incoming Secretary of Homeland Security, Governor Janet Napalitano, would hire Joe Lieberman’s 2006 campaign manager to be the department’s spokesman?
Why would Secretary-designate Janet Napolitano choose such an integrity-impaired spokesbot for her department, especially one with such close ties to and deep understanding of the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee, Senator Joseph Lieberman? Can the American people trust Sean Smith to tell the truth from the DHS podium when we need to hear it?
Or will we be treated to more fantastic stories like the one he told the national media about the Lieberman campaign website hack?
Hopefully you remember Sean Smith’s outrageous accusation during the primary that Lamont’s campaign had hacked into the Lieberman website and crashed it. It turned out, after a Connecticut justice department investigation, that the Lieberman campaign was paying something like twenty bucks a month for their server and it couldn’t handle the load. Actually, bloggers figured that out on their own in about six hours, but whatever.
Mr. Partridge is correct when he says that the DHS needs to repair their credibility gap (color-coded terror charts, Katrina). I doubt Sean Smith will be overly helpful in that regard. But the simple answer to Partridge’s question is that Napalitano hired Lieberman’s old campaign manager as an olive branch to the chairman of the Senate Homeland Security committee. It’s an act of good will. Mr. Smith will give press conferences from time to time and answer reporters’ questions on a daily basis. He almost definitely would not have been hired for this job if Lieberman had been stripped of his chairmanship of the Homeland Security committee, but that doesn’t mean it matters very much, if at all, that he was hired.
