A Reflection on Power, Integrity, and the Road Not Taken
By Lex Enrico Santi, LCSW, MFA
In 2003, I was a returned Peace Corps volunteer living in Washington, DC, in a bare-bones apartment with weak air conditioning. My wife at the time, a brilliant and hilarious Romanian woman, held the passport of the country I had just served. We were broke—stretched thin after putting down a deposit for our apartment on 18th and Columbia. The United States was at war in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I had no idea what I was going to do with my life. I had just acquired a used iBook and started writing again. We were scared and alone, trying to make something of ourselves, when I was presented with a job offer that could have changed the entire trajectory of my life—and, perhaps, a country’s.
I loved politics then, but I deeply mistrusted the Republican Party. The wars we were involved in seemed as futile as the war on drugs. I was knee-deep in organizing the Wesley Clark for President campaign, standing on street corners in my free time, writing political pieces against the War on Terror, and engaging in other wonky pursuits (see my blog circa, 2003). I didn't see John Kerry as a viable candidate for President but pushed on with my grassroots organizing.
Then, an email arrived from a friend. They had forwarded me a job listing from The Hill:
"Wanted: American with Romanian-speaking experience and a love for politics."
I answered immediately, attaching my resume and writing samples. A few days later, I sat for an interview.
The Job Offer of a Lifetime
The first interview took place in a nondescript political consulting office, one of those acronym-laden suites where men in sharp gray and blue suits spoke in hushed tones. For two hours, they grilled me about my experience in DC: my Peace Corps service, fundraising work, English teaching, hitchhiking through Romania, my graduate school applications, and my current job with the federal government.
They explained the role—consulting for democratic-minded parties worldwide. The assignment? Romania.
Before I left, the lead consultant, a man with specks of gray in his hair, glanced at my list of references and smirked.
“Oh, we worked at the White House together,” he said, as if that sealed the deal.
The second interview was barely an interview. It was a job offer. The vetting was done. My references had sung my praises. They needed someone with political instincts, an understanding of Romania, and fluency in the language. I was young and ambitious.
Then came the offer:
"How would you like to run the presidential campaign for Adrian Năstase, the current prime minister of Romania?"
My breath caught.
"We’d like to hire you for $10,000 a month while you’re there, plus a signing bonus, a moving bonus, and a win bonus."
In today’s inflation-adjusted dollars, that would be nearly $18,000 a month (Bureau of Labor Statistics Inflation Calculator, 2025). The campaign was expected to last eight months, meaning I would walk away with over $100,000 tax-free under the Foreign Earned Income Exclusion (IRS, 2025).
To put that in perspective, my entire undergraduate debt at the time was $40,000—a sum that felt insurmountable on a nonprofit salary. This job wouldn’t just wipe out my debt; it would set me up for economic stability for years. No more ramen dinners. No more sleepless nights worrying about rent. A down payment on a house. Travel. The kind of stability that most 20-somethings in DC could only dream of.
The Path to Power—and the Road I Didn't Take
Beyond the money, the connections were undeniable. Mark Gearan, one of my top references, had risen through the Clinton Administration, later serving as Director of the Peace Corps before earning a JD from Harvard. The people in that world didn’t just climb ladders—they were carried upward by networks of power. Had I taken the job, there is some egostical part of me that thought, I would have been next in line.
By 2004, Barack Obama was on the rise—delivering his now-famous DNC speech and laying the groundwork for his presidency. The people I was working with would have been watching his ascent, and my experience as a campaign manager for a national election in Europe would have positioned me for a senior political post down the line.
Instead of staring down student loans, I could have been eyeing a Chief of Staff role or a State Department appointment. Instead of an old Toyota, I could have been driving a Porsche or, like, a really nice Toyota, through the streets of Georgetown. The world was paved with gold and connections—and I saw it. But I turned it down.
My partner, whose family had suffered under communism, was baffled by my decision.
The Moral Dilemma
Two images of Năstase flashed in my mind.
One was from ProTV—him stepping out of a Mercedes, bloated, chin tucked into his collar, a symbol of entrenched power. The other, not exactly divorced from the first, was the blunt truth of Romanian politics: corruption wasn’t an anomaly; it was the system (BBC News, 2004).
My wife, Cristina, reminded me: “They’re all corrupt.”
She wasn’t wrong. Romania had spent decades under an especially brutal form of communism, leaving its people cynical and distrustful of politicians. But could I be the exception? Could I make a difference? Or would I just become another cog in the machine?
When I hesitated for more than 24 hours, they sent in a closer—a woman who had worked on Rudy Giuliani’s campaign. I don’t remember her name, but her message was clear:
“Your life will be set. I don’t understand why you wouldn’t take this job.”
The pressure was mounting.
The Call That Changed Everything
At 2 AM on a Sunday night, I called Jeremy, the hiring manager. I left a voicemail.
"I can’t take the position."
I hung up, locked myself in the bathroom, and cried. Outside, the nightlife of Adams Morgan snaked around 18th and Columbia below me. Horns honked. The anemic window air conditioner from our bedroom, which doubled as a living room and my office struggled to keep up. I slept fitfully that night and in the morning I felt--relieved.
For a week, I felt numb. I was at a crossroads, and I had chosen to pursue an MFA in creative writing instead. But the weight of the decision lingered.
What If?
I followed the Romanian election closely. By the early 2000s, Romania was teetering between its corrupt past and a possible new era. The DA Alliance (Justice and Truth Alliance) formed in 2003 as a direct challenge to the ruling Social Democratic Party (PSD), which had dominated post-communist Romania. At the head of the opposition was Traian Băsescu, the sharp-tongued, populist mayor of Bucharest, who had a knack for cutting through political double-speak. He and Călin Popescu-Tăriceanu, leader of the National Liberal Party (PNL), built the coalition on promises of anti-corruption, economic reform, and aligning Romania with the West. When Băsescu won the presidency in 2004, it flipped the country’s trajectory. His victory would eventually lead to the unraveling of PSD’s grip on power—and the downfall of Adrian Năstase, who just months earlier had assumed his presidency was inevitable.
Năstase lost.
After the election, he continued his political career but was soon entangled in corruption charges. In 2012, he was sentenced to two years in prison for campaign finance fraud. When police arrived to take him into custody, he shot himself in the throat. He survived (Reuters, 2012).
In the years that passed I went to get my MFA at George Mason. I wrote thousands of poems. I switched to fiction in the program and had begin building the threads of a writing career which then transitioned to that of a social worker. By 2012 then, I was in graduate school for my MSW, building a different life. I hadn’t even known about his suicide attempt until years later.
Would I have been able to swing the election for him? I would have done everything in my power to attack, massage and take down the DA party. Still to this day there is a sneaky egotistical part of me that wonders what would have been the daily, weekly messaging campaigns that I would have taken to bring down men who wished to fight corruption.
If I had taken the job, I surely would have befriended him, supported him. Would I have been caught in the fallout? Would I have been called into tribunals?
The Road Not Taken
Romania ultimately embraced anti-corruption reforms, partly to secure entry into the European Union. But today, there’s growing disillusionment—many Romanians feel they traded one set of problems for another.
I think about that sometimes. What if I had taken the job? What if I had chosen power over integrity?
Twenty years later, I look at my life with a sense of pride. I have two master’s degrees, a mountain of student debt, and a career in therapy and writing. I have a wife and a beautiful son. It’s not glamorous, but it’s fulfilling.
Had I taken the other path, would I have been whispering in back rooms, making deals? Would I have had to look my friend in the eye and ask, "Are you okay?" after he put a gun in his mouth? Would have I been simply looking at this life and wondering: did I make the right choice.
I’ll never know if the job I turned down would have made a difference. It is foolish and painful to think of what I could have done differently or what sort of man I would have turned out to be. However, I know the following: this life, this life of fulfilling my life work was all that I have ever wanted: to help people on a day-to-day basis. To connect my story to others and help people rewrite their own life.
I do know this: it doesn't matter whether it changed the course of history, it changed my own history; my life and my soul remains intact. And in the end, that’s what matters.
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