by Jules Witcover

President Obama, who upon election advised his party to turn the other cheek to the misdeeds of the Bush presidency, is about to be repaid for his charity. A spree of Republican investigations has been promised into what his accuser has called "one of the most corrupt administrations" in modern times.

Actually the critic, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, at first said on the Rush Limbaugh show that Obama was "one of the most corrupt presidents," but later corrected himself to impersonalize his target. Either way, it wouldn't matter all that much except that Issa, in the new Republican House, is chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, with wide-ranging subpoena power.

Issa says he intends to cast a wide net to catch Obama administration wrongdoers in coping with the economic morass, the war in Afghanistan, food safety and other regulations, and apparently in whatever else touches his fancy to sustain the sweeping allegation of Democratic corruption. So far, though, little has surfaced.

Others in the Republican leadership, by comparison, have a much less accusatory agenda as the new Congress gets underway. They merely want to undo the major achievements of Obama's first two White House years, such as health-care and Wall Street reform that may have saved the country from plunging into an even deeper recession.

In other words, the Party of No, which worked to block the president at every turn in the first half of his term, will dedicate itself during the second half to doing all it can do to deny him another term. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, after all, has candidly said his prime goal over the next two years is to assure that Obama will be a one-term president.

If so, liberal Democrats still smarting at their president's early counsel not to investigate the mistakes, abuses and crimes of the Bush administration will only lament that advice all the louder. To them, Obama's original notion that the Republicans would gratefully join hands in sweet bipartisanship to help him change the way Washington does business only demonstrated the naivete of the new kid in town.

In essentially agreeing to sweep under the rug the damage done by Bush to the economy, as well as to U.S. international respect and regard for the law both at home and abroad, Obama abetted what he himself later called the "amnesia" of American voters.

In the midterm congressional elections, those voters disregarded Bush's destructive record and instead swallowed the GOP argument that his mismanagement of the one war he started and the other from which he recklessly diverted U.S. military power was now irrelevant. The result was what Obama described as the "shellacking" he suffered in November.

The Republicans clearly are not going to repeat the political mistake the Democratic president made in insisting that his party launch no congressional investigations into the Bush wrongdoing from 2001 through 2008. They intend to keep Obama busy defending his health-care reforms against their drive for repeal, even as his administration is occupied with the fishing expeditions of Darrell Issa.

Perhaps Obama ultimately will be proved wise to have eschewed looking back at the excesses that made the George W. Bush administration arguably the worst since the Great Depression in economic policy and the most reckless ever in foreign policy. Maybe in the end the Democratic president's stubborn attempts to work with an opposition party openly bent on bringing him down will eventually gain him public sympathy and even approval. But don't bet the farm on it.

Even before the November defeats Obama suffered, it seemed clear that his political fate would rest on whether, by the time of the 2012 presidential election, he could revive the economy and end the two wars he inherited. That may well prove to be the case, whether or not he can finally find some common ground with the opposition party.

The effort to repeal what the Republicans love to call Obamacare seems destined to fail in light of Democratic control of the Senate and the president's veto power. But having to wage the fight itself can do much to impede Obama's own agenda of unfinished business over the next two years.

 

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Fishing for Democratic Corruption | Politics

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