Good advice to the GOP candidates from a Brit.

American Way: Whiff of scandal now taints Barack Obama.

Rick Perry’s brain freeze and Herman Cain’s alleged penchant for blondes have fixated the American media in recent days. Liberals, sensing there might yet be hope for President Barack Obama, are engaging in a fresh round of condescending chortling about the idiocy of the Grand Old Party.

Certainly, recent Republican shenanigans have provided ample fodder for late-night comedians. Talk to many ordinary Americans beyond Washington’s Beltway, however, and you tend to hear about other concerns.

Yes, they are preoccupied with the prospect of a double-dip recession and unemployment. But two topics that were raised again and again by people I met in Michigan this week were the brewing scandals surrounding Republican-led investigations into Solyndra and Operation Fast and Furious. . .

But the appearance of Attorney General Eric Holder on Capitol Hill last week underlined the problems that Obama faces in his re-election bid as he attempts to portray himself as an honest broker who rises above partisan politics – just as Tony “pretty much a straight kind of guy” Blair before him.

Holder was schooled in the last Democratic administration and his word-parsing performance was certainly one of Clintonian virtuosity. In a February letter, Holder’s department denied that illegal guns had been allowed into Mexico. Now that this had been revealed as untrue, Holder carefully conceded that the letter “could have been better crafted” and blamed ATF officials.

His recollection in May that he had first heard about Fast and Furious in the “past few weeks” had been mistaken, he admitted. “I should probably have said a couple of months.” He insisted that he did not read 2010 briefings about the operation that were addressed to him.

Asked whether he would apologise to Agent Terry’s family, to whom he has never spoken, he declined, preferring instead the formulation once favoured by Gerry Adams, the Sinn Fein president, when asked about IRA atrocities. “I certainly regret what happened to Agent Terry,” he said.

By this weekend, Holder had decided he would say “sorry” to the Terry family and offered to meet them while at the same time slamming Republicans for using “inflammatory and inappropriate rhetoric about the operation in an effort to score political points”.

Although Holder refused to discuss it at the congressional hearing, Dennis Burke, a Democrat-appointed US attorney in Arizona, has admitted leaking damaging information about the Special Agent who first blew the whistle on the failings in Operation Fast and Furious back in January.

One of the primary roles of Congress is to hold the executive branch to account. Democrats pursued the Bush administration relentlessly but are crying foul now that Republicans are starting to uncover malfeasance on the part of the holier-than-thou Obama.

Those candidates vying for the chance to kick Obama out of the White House would do well to turn their attention away from each other’s own goals and concentrate on the misdeeds of the current administration being uncovered by Republicans on Capitol Hill. Cronyism, incompetence, stonewalling, evasion and smears – it is not a pretty picture.