How likely was it on 9/12/2001 that the next president would be an African-American named Barack Hussein Obama? If the presidency is the championship of politics, he is clearly the best at it.
I have always been impressed by the Obama political Rope-a-Dope, in which his opponents flail away and beat themselves. It can't be dumb luck on Obama's part, it's a setup from a deniable distance. I think that is what we are seeing in the torture issue.
Even though his hand was forced by the courts, Obama released the memos and then stepped back from the result, which helps him by forcing his political opponents to defend extremely infertile territory.
I will agree that to me his response should have been a little closer to "Hang the bastards," than what we got. But wait. There's more, because this guy is smarter than I am, and he shows it every day and in every way. He knows that the discussion helps him.
Now it's out there, and to a large extent it's out of Obama's hands, but those hands are also very clean in the matter. The matter cannot be contained, suppressed or stopped, and Obama knows it has legs and a life of its own. He doesn't need to help it along because it's not stopping anyway and the great political news is that it can't touch him. With no personal ground to defend, he can let his surrogates fight the battles, the same surrogates who will be running for election soon.
The GOP has already had to fall back from their original position that "We don't torture," to the new talking point, "Well, we slapped them around and made them stand up for a week and waterboarded one guy 183 times, if you call that 'torture,' but it really worked great." As the anecdotal attorney pointed out, we know what you are, so all we have left to determine is your price.
To investigate or not? Investigations are certain to turn up a lot of political dynamite, so the GOP has to try to limit them and Democrats want to encourage them. That means that for the next six months or a year while this is hashed out, the GOP is on the wrong side of the torture "debate," which is a misnomer that suggests that the subject is even open for discussion. Whatever damage the Democrats might suffer from investigation, the GOP will suffer a lot more and Obama not at all.
When it comes to "wedge" issues, torture knocks the stuffing out of abortion or same-sex marriages. Democratic candidates can run on a "What are they hiding" theme and make GOP candidates publicly defend votes against investigating torture. It's not like there are a lot of new GOP ideas that they can talk about instead, so the issue can't be avoided. This will be THE big political football for the next few months, and the GOP will never control the ball. Obama's allies have the GOP surrounded and outnumbered and running low on ammo, and all he has to do is get out the folding chairs and the popcorn while the GOP defends the low ground.
As long as the debate is about torture it hurts the GOP and helps Obama, so it would be hard to suggest he isn't interested in rubbing the GOP faces in it for as long as the subject has legs. I think he has more subtle means of doing so than we may appreciate at the moment.
I'm pretty sure that the next time anyone from the upper echelons of the Bush administration takes a question, it will be about torture. How long will they be able to hide? This summer might be a great one for political fireworks, especially watched from the South Lawn.