By JIM BARON

CRANSTON — U.S. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse drew big applause at a Martin Luther King Day breakfast Monday when he observed, “A year from today the Bush administration will be gone.”

In an interview immediately afterward, Whitehouse made it clear that he is marking the days off a mental calendar until a new president gets sworn in.
“It’s a new day on Jan. 20, 2009,” the state’s junior senator said. “But it is not a day in the sun, it is not a day at the beach. It is a work day. It is a day where we are going to have to start cleaning up a terrible mess that’s been left, as well as trying to rebuild some of America’s great institutions.”
Institutions, he says, such as the Department of Justice that needs to be re-established as a place where people “tell the truth and stay out of politics;” or the nation’s health care delivery system, which must now be renewed as a place that “serves people when they need it, invests money wisely in prevention and technology.
“The structure of government has been corroded by the Bush administration for many years, throughout many different agencies,” the freshman Democrat asserted, creating a need “to rebuild reliance on science, to rebuild trust in leadership that is goal-oriented rather than politically oriented.
“When ideology trumps the facts, when the easy corruption of helping your friends infiltrates and when people lead not because of what they know or what their work ethic is, but because they are prepared to deliver politically for the Bush administration, that has an effect throughout the whole infrastructure of government.”
Whitehouse speculates that the prospect of leaving the presidency is going to make Bush, “even more stubborn and given that his administration has really built itself a legacy of disgrace, he has not much to lose. So the incentive for him to take some desperate act that he thinks some future generation will view as Churchillian or heroic and salvage his disastrous administration is pretty strong and I think that makes him even more dangerous in his last year.”
In the coming year, Whitehouse expects his time and attention will be absorbed by two major issues – health care and the FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act).
“I’m obviously going to be much more involved in the FISA because I am on the two relevant committees (Senate Intelligence and Senate Judiciary) and I have been very involved in the whole process. The issues about intelligence and about when and under what terms you allow the government to spy on Americans are ones I am familiar with from my law enforcement experience running wiretap investigations,” said the former U.S. Attorney for Rhode Island and state attorney general.
“So I have a fairly active role in the FISA legislation and until that gets through, that’s going to take a lot of my time.”
Whitehouse spent many high-profile moments in the first year of his term sparring with then-Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the administration over provisions of the FISA law and related legislation.
On health care, one of Whitehouse’s pet projects since he went to Washington to succeed Republican Lincoln Chafee after a contentious and bruising campaign, the senator concedes that “I doubt we’ll get much accomplished under this president. But if we can lay the groundwork so that the next president has the chance to move rapidly and effectively with good legislation that’s been teed-up, thought-through, worked-over and that the ground has been prepared for, that’s work worth doing.
“In some respects we are looking beyond this year,” he added. “George Bush has demonstrated that all he wants to do is stop things in Congress. It’s all he can do, none of his ideas has any credibility, nobody wants to support anything he wants support. That leaves him with the choice between being irrelevant and being obstructionist and he has chosen to be obstructionist.”
Whitehouse is an active supporter of New York Sen. Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for president, co-chairing her Rhode Island effort.
He believes the primary at this point is down to a race between her and Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, and says “I would be happy with either. I have strong personal reasons for supporting Hillary Clinton having worked in Clinton administration and having first-hand experienced the aftermath of the (Gov. Edward) DiPrete administration, when everything fell in on (his successor) Bruce Sundlun” for whom Whitehouse was a top aide.
“The idea of having a capable team ready to hit the ground running right away could be important,” Whitehouse said. “The legacy of George Bush is not over on the day he leaves the White House. He is going to leave an overhang of incompetence and ideology and missed opportunity that will shadow America for decades. And the president that those overhangs fall in on are going to have to be very capable.”
What if that president turns out to be a Republican?
“When I see the way (former New York Mayor Rudolph) Giuliani and (former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt) Romney move about, to try to capture their party’s support, it makes it hard for me to believe that they have the integrity necessary to recreate that spirit of service. McCain, I think, could. Because I think he is a deeply honorable man. My differences with him have to do with the policy judgments he would make. But I do think he would try to run an honorable administration that made the calls based on the merits.”
Whitehouse calls the War in Iraq “the single most frustrating” issue of his term so far. 
“I have done everything I can, voted every way I can to try to put pressure on the Bush administration to re-think their policy and focus on bringing our troops home,” he said. “It is particularly frustrating because I believe the prospect of American troop withdrawal would be very advantageous both within Iraq and within the surrounding Middle Eastern region,” he said. “If we make people realize we’re not going to be there and carry the whole load, they’re going to have to figure it out and focus a little on their own.”
The military effort in Iraq, Whitehouse noted, was designed to do three things: to undo the de-Baathification that eliminated from the Iraq government all members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, pass a local provincial elections law and pass a law to distribute oil revenues.
In the last nine months or so, only the de-Baathification law has passed and Whitehouse calls that “a botched job.”
Iraqis, he said, “have to build a civil society and they have to make the key compromises among the different religious and ethnic groups necessary to build that civil society and if they are unwilling to do so, then we are there indefinitely.”
Can the American economy be kept from tumbling into a recession?
“I don’t have a quick yes on that,” Whitehouse admitted. “I think we will do what we can. For a lot of people in America, they are living in a recession. Their wages are going no place, heating oil costs three times as much, gas is way up, health care expense is up. To an huge number of people in America it feels an awful lot like a recession right now.
“Something will happen,” the senator suggested, “I’m not prepared to say exactly what it is. The more we focus on immediate needs, heating assistance, Food Stamps, unemployment benefits, things that hit the economy immediately rather than tax cuts that won’t come until after next April. If the purpose is to stimulate the economy by having people spend, the place that will most likely happen is with people who don’t have a lot of money sitting around. When they get money they will spend it, they have to spend it. They need food, they need prescriptions, they need winter coats for their kids, that’s where the stimulus should come.”