The Two Sides Of AmeriCorps

Since it's a new day, the Right has to latch on to a new way to attack President Obama. This time it's the much maligned AmeriCorps, the public/private corporation that funds large volunteer projects in American cities. Clinton started it, Dubya kept it going for 8 years and Obama pledged to greatly expand it (much to the hatred of the Right, Michele Bachmann famously referred to the program as "re-education camps for young people".)

But there's two sides to the story that Obama has asked for the resignation of the Inspector General overseeing AmeriCorps. Side one is that the ousted IG, Gerald Waupin, is a holdover from the Bush years and targeted Obama friend, former NBA star and current Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson as political payback. Waupin was fired for abusing his position, and was told he had exactly one hour to resign or be fired on Wednesday night. It wouldn't exactly be the first time a Bush appointee played politics while going after Democrats (recall, oh, the entire Alberto Gonzales Justice Department) and the fact there's enough precedent in the Bush administration to ask "Who watches the Watchmen?" is in and of itself a damn shame.

But side two is that where there's smoke, there's fire...and that Waupin really did uncover some major graft and corruption in faithfully executing his job as Inspector General over AmeriCorps, and he was fired unfairly for it. Waupin says he found that Kevin Johnson was using AmeriCorps grants to pay for "personal errands, including washing his car", and that the major AmeriCorps project in Sacramento, the St. HOPE Academy, had "shoddy bookkeeping practices" in documenting how it spent nearly $800,000 in AmeriCorps grant money. The U.S. Attorney's Office in Sacramento settled the case against St. HOPE Academy and found there was no basis for criminal charges.

The real problem is that both Waupin side and Kevin Johnson's side of the story seem pretty damn fishy. I think the truth to this matter is somewhere in between: Johnson got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, but Waupin literally turned it into a vendetta to cause as much damage to AmeriCorps and the Democrats as possible.

You can bet the Wingers will be all over this story, but frankly compared to the shenanigans of the Bush years, their cries of OBAMA'S CHICAGO WAY ring rather hollow compared to, say, Bush's pardoning of Scooter Libby or the intelligence fixing running up to the Iraq War.

We'll see how this plays out.