With the House set on Friday to convene the first of its hearings into the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, the lessons learned from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, which cost Republicans in elections in 1998, have been on display in recent days. Republicans took obvious pains to balance their investigatory zeal with a promise to stay committed to a legislative agenda.

From The New York Times:

The investigations ensnaring the White House have unified the Republican Party, energized a political base shattered by election losses and given common purpose to lawmakers divided over a legislative agenda.

The most pressing question for Congressional Republicans is no longer how to finesse changes to immigration law or gun control, but how far they can push their cases against President Obama without inciting a backlash of the sort that has left them staggering in the past.

With the House set on Friday to convene the first of its hearings into the targeting of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, the lessons learned from the impeachment of President Bill Clinton, which cost Republicans in elections in 1998, have been on display in recent days. Republicans took obvious pains to balance their investigatory zeal with a promise to stay committed to a legislative agenda.

 

Republicans privately acknowledge political benefits like rekindling the fervor of the Tea Party — a key ingredient in 2010 Congressional victories — particularly given the fact that the I.R.S. was subjecting those very groups to special scrutiny.
 

“Few things can get the conservative base as fired up as being targeted by an agency in the government of a president they already strongly dislike,” said Brad Dayspring, a spokesman for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which is already using the I.R.S. case against some Senate Democrats who are up for re-election.

 

As of now, Republican strategists say they do not expect voters to flood the polls in November 2014 to vote against the president’s party over Benghazi, the seizure of phone logs of Associated Press reporters, or even the political intrusion by the I.R.S. Instead, they say, Republicans will use the controversies to undermine Mr. Obama’s credibility, question his competence and diminish his political capital. The cases also help them tar the health care law, gun control efforts and Mr. Obama’s regulatory agenda as just more examples of government overreach.

 

At the outset of his second term, President George W. Bush was able to prosecute the Iraq war with little political interference, despite its unpopularity. It was Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 that cemented a reputation for incompetence that dogged the Bush administration to its end. Republicans are working off the same playbook.

 

To veteran lawmakers, the sudden proliferation of investigations cannot help but raise the ghost of 1998. After seizing control of Congress in 1995, Republicans opened investigations into the White House Travel Office, allegations of malfeasance around the Whitewater Development Corporation, and claims of campaign finance improprieties in the 1996 presidential campaign. Representative Dan Burton, Republican of Indiana, famously shot a melon in trying to prove that the White House lawyer Vincent W. Foster Jr. did not commit suicide.
 

But it was the impeachment of Mr. Clinton that cost Republicans seats in the House, cost Newt Gingrich his job as House speaker, and ultimately lifted a moribund Democratic president from the political depths.
 

Mr. Gingrich said in an interview that the parallel could be taken only so far. Impeachment, he said, was about perjury, not sexual indiscretion, but that was lost on most Americans — much to the fault of the House Republicans.
 

“If we had been calmer and more focused, we would have done better and had a better argument for the American people,” he said.
 

This time, the questions around the I.R.S., the A.P. subpoena, Benghazi and Ms. Sebelius arise not from Mr. Obama personally, but from the actions of his administration, and they go at the very least to Mr. Obama’s ability to govern. At worst, Mr. Gingrich said, investigations will move toward whether senior White House officials knew of improper or even illegal acts and chose to cover them up in an election year.
 

“It’s always the cover-up that kills you,” he said.