Joe Sestak, D-Pa.

If clumsiness were an indictable offense, then the White House officials responsible for those overtures might well be in trouble. But when people compare such ham-handed deal-making with the crimes of Watergate, it can only mean that they don’t remember what the country and the Constitution endured under Nixon — or that they cynically assume nobody else does.

Some of us do, however. And for those who don’t, or who never learned the true history of the Nixon era in high school or college, there are several gripping books, including  “The Wars of Watergate” by  Stanley Kutler, “Nightmare: The Underside of the Nixon Years” by the late  Tony Lukas, and of course Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein’s classic “All the President’s Men.” (The latter is also the title of a wonderful movie that outlines the conspiracy but necessarily omits most of the grim details.)

” Watergate” was the place where the president’s henchmen staged a “third-rate burglary” of the Democratic National Committee headquarters on a June night in 1972, but its historical definition is the vast gangsterism of the Nixon regime. Watergate involved no political job offers, but a series of burglaries, warrantless domestic wiretaps, illegal spying, campaign dirty tricks, and assorted acts of thuggery by a group of goons whose leaders included G. Gordon Liddy and the late E. Howard Hunt. Watergate meant a coverup of those felonies with more felonies, set up by lawyers and bureaucrats who collected cash payoffs from major corporations and then handed out hush money and secret campaign slush funds. Watergate implicated dozens of perps, from Hunt and Liddy all the way up to the president, his palace guard, and his crooked minions at the highest levels of the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA.

Plenty of Watergate experts can be summoned to evaluate the current comparisons with the Sestak/Romanoff brouhaha — not just superb historians like Kutler and Robert Dallek or celebrated journalists like Woodward, Bernstein and Seymour Hersh, but the surviving veterans of the Nixon regime itself, from Henry Kissinger, Pat Buchanan and Roger Ailes on down to Lucianne Goldberg and Chuck Colson. If they are anywhere near as honest as the  redeemed John Dean, they’d have to laugh at any suggested resemblance between the felonious wilding of the Nixon era and the tame wheeling and dealing of Rahm Emanuel.

So perhaps the time has come to amend or extend Godwin’s Law: The first to cry ” Watergate” loses the argument. 

Theories about impeachable offenses committed by Clinton began to appear in right-wing forums as early as 1994, when such “scandals” as Whitewater, the FBI files screw-up and the White House Travel Office imbroglio were still new. To most observers those theories still sounded like a joke over the ensuing years, right up through the fall of 1997, when Bob Tyrrell, then the editor of the American Spectator, convened a dinner of conservatives at a Capitol Hill restaurant to plot the impeachment of Clinton.

The point is that no matter how heavy-handed and disreputable Issa may seem, he represents an attitude that has never changed in his party, which was not chastened by its electoral losses after the Clinton impeachment. Listening to right-wing propaganda against Obama over the past year or so, such as the “birther” meme, it is clear that there is a certain kind of Republican that still thinks any Democratic president lacks legitimacy by definition, and that those Republicans will entertain any scheme to eject a Democrat from the Oval Office.

Assuming that today’s White House explanation of the Sestak episode is accurate, such attempted horse-trading scarcely amounts to a constitutional offense contemplated by the founders as impeachable. But then neither did the Lewinsky affair — and that didn’t stop the Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee from abusing their power when they had the numbers to do so.

Obama should take the Sestak maneuver as an early warning against placing too much trust in his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose arrogance will surely cross a line someday if it has not already. Clinton’s impeachment was the culmination of years of propaganda, planning and political preparation, all awaiting an opportune moment that inevitably arrived.

Both in their campaign and in the White House, leading members of the Obama team have emphasized their cool disdain for all things Clinton. This bad week should put an end to those pretensions. The president and his aides ought to try learning from the Clinton experience instead, because for them, as Democrats in the White House, very little has changed.