Over the past several months, the steady depletion of President George W. Bush’s political capital has complicated US efforts to promote an ambitious domestic and international agenda. With the end of the investigation by Patrick Fitzgerald, special counsel, into the outing of Valerie Plame, the former Central Intelligence Agency operative, the trend may well reach a tipping point. Expectation is rising that the grand jury considering evidence in the matter could issue indictments of some key Bush administration officials. The implications of such indictments for the continued effectiveness of the Bush White House are likely to be profound.

Some pundits have compared the Bush administration’s current troubles to those that afflicted the two most recent second-term presidents – the Iran-Contra scandal that plagued the Reagan administration and the impeachment proceedings against Bill Clinton. But these comparisons ignore three important differences between the past and present scandals, and understate the potential magnitude of the Plame investigation for both domestic and international politics.