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What goes around... You'll Never Guess What HappenedBy Rick Horowitz
You write about politics for a living, you get used to surprises. There are little surprises, and there are big surprises. You learn to roll with them. But then there are surprises that are so enormous, that come so totally out of the blue, that you don't have any idea how to react. Which is why mere words can't come close to expressing how I felt the other day at the stunning news from Capitol Hill. The Democrats want to investigate the White House. Specifically, the Democrats -- or some of them, anyway -- want to investigate Karl Rove, senior adviser to President Bush and one of the inniest members of the president's inner circle. They want to know more about a meeting Mr. Rove held back in March with top executives of the Intel Corporation to discuss a merger-and-acquisition issue pending before the Bush administration. They're not sure, these Democrats say, that holding a meeting with top execs of the Intel Corporation is really a good thing for the senior adviser to the president to do -- or at least a senior adviser who at that very moment owns more than $100,000 of Intel stock. In fact, the Democrats -- or some of them, anyway -- think the whole thing smells. At the very least, they think it raises questions about an "appearance" of impropriety. They'd like to mull it over for a while. Preferably in public. In front of cameras. And here I was, thinking that bipartisanship was suddenly all the rage in Washington, that a new Era of Good Feeling had swept through the capital and washed all the bitterness and bile of the past eight years right into the Potomac. Silly me. Apparently the bitterness and bile of the past eight years haven't been forgotten. Or forgiven. "This is exactly the type of situation that you would have investigated had it occurred in the Clinton administration," wrote Democratic congressman Henry Waxman to his Republican colleague Dan Burton. Truth be told, Mr. Burton, the chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, did seem to have an inexhaustible curiosity about possible White House misbehavior while the Clintons had the run of the place. Turns out the Democrats were taking notes. And now that there's a new name on the doorbell at 1600 Pennsylvania, some Democrats would like the chance to call a few witnesses, and ask a few embarrassing questions, of their own -- and not just about Karl Rove. It almost looks -- how can I put this? -- as if some Democrats are intent on settling scores. That after all those years of watching their side getting torched by the Republicans, they've decided that one good burn deserves another. I couldn't have imagined it, not in my wildest dreams. "We understand that there have been past, partisan battles over investigations," says a Bush administration spokesman, "but these were battles and investigations this president and this administration were not involved in -- this president was off in Texas being governor." True enough. Of course, the Texas governor and his people certainly weren't shy about taking advantage of those investigations, about positioning their fella as the perfect antidote to all the Clinton-Gore sleaze their Republican friends on Capitol Hill were only too happy to keep digging up for the nightly news. And of course, the man who made so much of it come together for that Texas governor, who helped him polish that "time for a change" message he rode from Austin right into the Oval Office, was Mr. Bush's chief political strategist. Some guy named Rove. But payback? Who would ever have predicted it? They say elephants never forget. Them donkeys ain't no slouches neither. Posted 6/19/01. Get
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Rick Horowitz
