Joe Sestak talks 2016 Senate campaign

“The nation is yearning not for leadership, but for accountability,” Joe Sestak said to a group of students last night.

Penn Democrats brought the former Deputy in Chief of Naval Operations and U.S. Representative for Pennsylvania to Huntsman Hall, where he made clear his intention to run for the U.S. Senate in 2016. He launched an exploratory committee earlier this year.

Sestak, who tried to gain support for his upcoming campaign, said the government is not currently providing an incentive for Americans to live up to their full potential and that he wants to run for office to help “fight the fight that will achieve the American Dream.”

Sestak assured the students that he would seek to collaborate with Republicans if elected.

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To facilitate this kind of collaboration, he argued for a change to the Senate filibuster rules, calling it and other Senate rules “arcane,” adding “that everything in America has changed except the filibuster rules.”

When asked whether or not he would work to abolish the debt ceiling, Sestak considered himself “agnostic” on the issue, but he would if “we have to go through what we’re going through now,” referring to the recent government shutdown.

He criticized the shutdown and described what happened as holding the debt ceiling “hostage.”

Issues of national security and intelligence also figured largely in the question-and-answer session.

Sestak — once the Director of Defense Policy on the National Security Council in the White House — condemned the NSA in light of recent revelations of the agency’s large-scale surveillance programs, saying that “it has not been doing its job right” and that “there should be better accountability.”

He did, however, argue for the importance of the agency’s role as a security organization. “Government can be a force for good,” he said — but one that can do its job without violating Americans’ civil rights.

As for defense spending, Sestak believes that the government has been wasting too much money on fighter aircrafts, and that it should allocate more money to cyberspace warfare, because the “focus should not be on quantity, but on capability.”

“One aircraft today is worth nine aircrafts of 10, 15 years ago,” he added.

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Addressing more the audience than his campaign platform, Sestak expressed his extreme admiration for America’s youth because they are “skeptical of authority in a very healthy way.”

“Institutions have let this state down,” he said, citing decreasing employment rates for college graduates.

“I believe that America is at one of the most strategically important moments in its history,” he added, referring to the country’s invigorated youth, which he described as a “national treasure.”

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