Joe Conason: No, This Isn't "Watergate"
[Joe Conason writes a weekly column for Salon and the New York Observer. His new book is "It Can Happen Here: Authoritarian Peril in the Age of Bush."]
The quest for a Democratic Watergate that has preoccupied Republicans for more than three decades may never achieve fulfillment but surely will never end. Impeaching Bill Clinton promised satisfaction only to bring deeper frustration -- which must be one of the many reasons that we now hear politicians and pundits announcing the arrival of " Obama's Watergate" (and also why they never say " Obama's Whitewater" ).
So far, the alleged scandal that supposedly threatens the Obama presidency doesn't amount to much: a verbal mention of a nonpaying advisory post to Rep. Joe Sestak in a conversation with Clinton, and an e-mail mentioning three administration jobs to Andrew Romanoff, the Democratic speaker of the Colorado state assembly, dangled in order to dissuade them from entering primaries against incumbents favored by the president.
If clumsiness were an indictable offense, then the White House officials responsible for those overtures might well be in trouble. But when people compare such ham-handed deal-making with the crimes of Watergate, it can only mean that they don't remember what the country and the Constitution endured under Nixon -- or that they cynically assume nobody else does.
Some of us do, however. And for those who don't, or who never learned the true history of the Nixon era in high school or college, there are several gripping books, including "The Wars of Watergate" by Stanley Kutler, "Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years" by the late Tony Lukas, and of course Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's classic "All the President's Men." (The latter is also the title of a wonderful movie that outlines the conspiracy but necessarily omits most of the grim details.)...
Read entire article at Salon.com
The quest for a Democratic Watergate that has preoccupied Republicans for more than three decades may never achieve fulfillment but surely will never end. Impeaching Bill Clinton promised satisfaction only to bring deeper frustration -- which must be one of the many reasons that we now hear politicians and pundits announcing the arrival of " Obama's Watergate" (and also why they never say " Obama's Whitewater" ).
So far, the alleged scandal that supposedly threatens the Obama presidency doesn't amount to much: a verbal mention of a nonpaying advisory post to Rep. Joe Sestak in a conversation with Clinton, and an e-mail mentioning three administration jobs to Andrew Romanoff, the Democratic speaker of the Colorado state assembly, dangled in order to dissuade them from entering primaries against incumbents favored by the president.
If clumsiness were an indictable offense, then the White House officials responsible for those overtures might well be in trouble. But when people compare such ham-handed deal-making with the crimes of Watergate, it can only mean that they don't remember what the country and the Constitution endured under Nixon -- or that they cynically assume nobody else does.
Some of us do, however. And for those who don't, or who never learned the true history of the Nixon era in high school or college, there are several gripping books, including "The Wars of Watergate" by Stanley Kutler, "Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years" by the late Tony Lukas, and of course Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein's classic "All the President's Men." (The latter is also the title of a wonderful movie that outlines the conspiracy but necessarily omits most of the grim details.)...