From The Washington Post
By Ron Suskind

Senate Foreign Relations Committee aides debated last Tuesday whether to call deposed Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to the hearing table for a public flogging. The decision was no — at least for now. Later that day, I bumped into the incoming committee chairman, presidential hopeful Joseph R. Biden Jr. He said that while there was “extraordinary malfeasance” born of the Iraq crisis, he was planning to stay clear of all that. “That’s looking backward,” he said. “I’m in the ‘action plan’ department.”

Biden expressed concern about the inquisitorial zeal of some of his “friends in the House,” stressing that the key for both chambers will be “attaching all investigations to the broadest public purpose.”

The new Democratic Congress may well come down to a series of confrontations between the competing urges to investigate and to lead. Between delving into past wrongdoings and building consensus on how to proceed in Iraq. Between, in a sense, the Democratic Party’s show horses and its pit bulls.

Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), the soon-to-be chairman of the Government Reform Committee, is a classic pit bull. He has dreamed of subpoenas — issuing them, and placing witnesses under oath — for 12 years. Biden, meanwhile, is an unabashed show horse. The Delaware Democrat has dreamed of the Oval Office even longer. Both must exist within the new, mandate-infused Democratic Congress, and must figure out a way to survive together.

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