Don’t fall for it. The Republicans are attacking President-elect Barack Obama’s nomination of Eric Holder as attorney general. There are “red flags,” says Senator Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, starting with the pardon of financier Marc Rich.
Don’t fall for it. Losing the election, lacking ideas about how to fix the Bush-era mess, and unsure how or even whether to attack Obama personally, the conservatives are digging into the old bag of tricks. Karl Rove is the point man. The 1990s are the time frame.
Conservatives are practiced at this attack. The talking points have long since been written and mastered. Talk radio needs the exercise. The Holder nomination represents an attempt to relive the glory days of the past.
First, the facts. In the closing days of the Clinton presidency, then-Deputy Attorney General Holder approved a pardon of questionable quality. Rich had been indicted for tax evasion and fled to Switzerland. President Clinton ended the case with a pardon on January 20, 2001, the last day of his presidency. The pardon was not without some merit, although even Holder admits that “in hindsight I wish I had done some things differently.”
But some other facts are also worthy of note. Most importantly, it’s 2009. The country lost 2 million jobs last year. More than 2.5 million homes were foreclosed. The national debt doubled to $10 trillion. We’re in the midst of a recession that’s reaching historical scale. There’s a war on. Two of them. 47 million people in America don’t have health insurance.
Did I miss anything? The Interstate 35 bridge collapsed in Minneapolis. The levees failed in New Orleans. Thirty-six million Americans live in poverty. The cost of tuition at a public university went up 35 percent during the Bush years, while incomes dropped 1percent.
Maybe the President and the Congress could pay attention to these things. Maybe they could do something about it.
Actually, some of them are. The President-elect has put forward a plan to create jobs, rebuild our infrastructure and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
But the Republicans are complaining about an eight-year-old pardon. The same Republicans who sat around while George Bush turned the Department of Justice into a political tool, including hiring his White House counsel as Attorney General and firing U.S. Attorneys who refused to undertake political prosecutions. Now they’re worried that this well-proven civil servant, who earned his stripes on public corruption, might have made a mistake eight years ago.
Maybe he did. Or maybe he didn’t. But the world has moved on since then. We have other things to think about. Don’t fall for the distraction of litigating this long-dead case. Resist even the temptation to point out Bush’s own dubious pardons. Our people need doctors, our bridges need building, and the economy needs fixing. There’s work to do.
Politics here count for more than anything. If the conservatives win, it energizes the base for future battles. If the conservatives lose, they are driven farther into their corner. That’s why Karl Rove chose the battleground here, on fertile Clintonian soil.
The answer for progressives is to play this one like a team. Maybe your issue is health care and jobs. Maybe it’s reproductive choice or wounded veterans or the environment. It all wraps together here. You don’t have to cheer but at least don’t pile on. Let’s band together like a movement and put the past behind us. That’s the change we need.
