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Last week brought a refresher course in late-1990s politics, thanks to Monica Lewinsky. Those lessons might be useful to Republicans embarking on their Benghazi investigation.

Are House Republicans in danger of making the same mistake on Benghazi that House Republicans made on President Clinton's impeachment 16 years ago?

Staff writer

Mark is deputy national news editor for the Monitor.

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There's a poignancy to Monica Lewinsky bringing the politics of the late-1990s back into focus the same week House Republicans voted to create a special panel to investigate Benghazi.

Today, Republicans want to discover if the White House knowingly misled America about the causes of the Sept. 11, 2012, attacks in Benghazi, Libya, that killed four Americans, and then attempted to cover its tracks. In 1998, Republicans had more to sink their teeth into strong evidence that President Clinton had lied under oath about an affair with Ms. Lewinsky and they pushed it farther, actually impeaching Mr. Clinton.

But it blew up in their faces. Hoping to strengthen their House majority in the midterm elections that year, Republicans instead lost seats, forcing House Speaker Newt Gingrich to resign.

Much is different this time around. The American economy is nowhere near what it was in the Roaring '90s, and because of that, President Obama is nowhere near as popular as Clinton was in Year 6 of his presidency. Moreover, Benghazi is about the death of four Americans, including the ambassador; the Lewinsky scandal was about an affair.

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What Monica Lewinsky can teach Republicans about Benghazi (+video)

With political indicators and historical cycles in their favor, Republicans are pushing the envelope to further energize their base with a full assault on the head of the opposition.

Parties that dont control the White House invariably gain in midterm elections. But the anti-Clinton drive energized Democrats in 1998. That year, Republicans failed to gain congressional seats in a midterm for the first time since 1934 and for the first time in a presidents second term since 1822.

In 2014, the Republicans risk a smaller-scale fiasco with the creation of a special committee to investigate the 2012 tragedy in Benghazi, Libya, where four Americans, including the U.S. ambassador, were killed. House Republicans see this as a political two-fer: an attack on President Barack Obama and on the Democrats presumptive 2016 nominee, Hillary Clinton, who was secretary of state during the attack. This strategy is aimed at exciting the partys base and raising campaign cash.

Republican leaders say the purpose of the inquiry is to prove the administration initially tried to protect Obama in the middle of his re-election campaign by falsely claiming that the attack was a spontaneous reaction to an anti-Muslim video and not a carefully planned act of terrorism.

Republicans also aim to prove that the military response was inadequate and that there was a cover-up. They have seized on the White Houses failure to turn over a September 2012 memo from National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes that contains talking points on the tragedy. Rep. Trey Gowdy, the South Carolina Republican who was tapped to chair the special committee created after the House Oversight panel embarrassed the party with clumsy theatrics, has called the inquiry a trial.

The administration inflicted some of this pain on itself. The White House did try to spin the incident initially to protect the president, and the Rhodes document routine fare should have been turned over. But the real lesson of Benghazi is how dangerous the aftermath of the overthrow of a foreign dictator can be. After Iraq and Afghanistan, thats not a favorite Republican topic.

Furthermore, the details of Benghazi have been aired repeatedly, with more than a dozen congressional hearings, several committee reports, scores of interviews and 25,000 pages of documents turned over. A credible commission headed by respected diplomat Tom Pickering and Admiral Mike Mullen, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, faulted the State Department for systemic failures and management deficiencies in protecting American outposts. It just didnt provide the evidence of lies and cover-ups Republicans wanted.

Mullen and other military leaders say it wouldnt have been possible to send U.S. forces to Benghazi to save the ambassador. Gowdy, who in winning his congressional seat four years ago was a staunch supporter of the Iraq War, questions those assertions.

A comprehensive post-mortem of the tragedy by The New York Times, including eyewitness testimony, concluded that although there were warning signs before the attack, it wasnt, as some Republicans charge, directed by groups sympathetic to al-Qaida and there had been a spontaneous response to the video.

Some Republicans worry that with voters focusing on other issues, this inquiry could boomerang.

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