Getting it Right Moving Forward

In the course of indulging what has become the principal preoccupation of his life, viz., the defamation and slander of former President George W. Bush and his compatriots in the erstwhile administration, earlier this week Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) proposed a “truth commission” to investigate wrongdoing by those individuals. The primary goal of such a commission would be, as the rather Orwellian name suggests, the exposition of “truth”: “I’m doing this not to humiliate people or punish people but to get the truth out,” claimed Leahy during a speech at Georgetown University. According to the AP story, the specific non-humiliating, non-punitive “truth” Leahy seeks must be found through an inquiry that will “reach far beyond looking for misdeeds at the Justice Department under Bush to include matters of Iraq prewar intelligence and the Defense Department.” In other words, just about everything about our former president’s execution of his presidential duties is fair game. Unconfirmed reports have Leahy traveling from the Georgetown campus to nearby Washington & Lee University, where he proceeded to exhume the remains of Robert E. Lee’s beloved horse Traveler and beat it with a stick.

One could explain this behavior in several ways. It may be that Leahy is sending a strong message to Bernie Sanders that he will not be denied the title of Most Petulant Senator from Vermont. It may be that the man from our intermittently endearing home state simply has nothing else to occupy his time in this post-Messianic age. But what is far more likely is that Leahy knows exactly how to ensure Democratic dominance for the foreseeable future: giving DailyKos its daily bread in the form of an inexhaustible and quotidian supply of Bush’s misdeeds. The recent success of the Party of Wilson is directly attributable to the rabble-rousing immanence of Bush, but their big gains have come at the expense of he-who-revs-up-Leftist-donors. Leahy’s attempt is to maintain the hatred in the absence of the man, and it just might work. Far from being a kook, Leahy is an incredibly shrewd political calculator.

There is at least one important person, however, who doesn’t think the commission such a good idea. President Barack Obama had not yet reviewed the plan in detail, but he did express the thought that “generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking back.” He made a few other noncommittal remarks, all of which made it eminently clear that Leahy’s big idea is going nowhere with the new administration. Now, this is a marked departure from the rhetoric of the campaign trail, and it seems that President Obama is turning his back on the anti-Bush fanaticism which helped to catapult him into office. What gives?

For one thing, President Obama is showing genuine restraint and prudence here. Let it not be said that I imputed only avaricious motives to a man who is, at very least, comporting himself with a dignity worthy of the office, and a judiciousness admirable and increasingly rare (especially in the Vermont senatorial delegation). This explanation, however, is true but not exhaustive. The President simply cannot afford to have such a commission operating while he is trying to conduct a series of wars. My esteemed colleague wrote an excellent post last month about Obama’s substantive indistinguishability from Bush on national security issues. What we see here is a further manifestation of this same fact. Obama is tacitly admitting that many of the Bush administration’s policies were the correct ones, and while he repudiates them in public he sticks to them in the conduct of his presidential duties. A “truth commission” would highlight the similarities between the policies under review and the power currently in being. Seen in this light, Obama’s slightly puzzling comment on the Leahy proposal makes perfect sense: “let’s get it right moving forward.” In this case, “getting it right moving forward” means retaining the unpopular but effective policies of the President’s predecessor.