President Obama’s second-term campaign slogan was “Forward,” but instead we’ve got cover-ups, congressional investigations and the government persecution of political opponents and reporters.

That sounds like “backward” to me. All the way to, say, 1972.

Who would have guessed that just a few months into his second term, President Obama would be compared to Tricky Dick. And by a liberal Massachusetts Democrat — U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano.

Republicans could not even have scripted this one. The agency most hated by voters, the Internal Revenue Service, admits to going on a Nixonian witch hunt against Tea Party and conservative groups during the re-election campaign.

This is a story even the most partisan Massachusetts liberal cannot defend. It’s so bad that even Ed Markey is calling for heads to roll.

Now we learn that the Justice Department has secretly obtained the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors in what appears to be an investigation of an AP story that disclosed details of a CIA operation that stopped a terrorist attack.

Going after the Tea Party is one thing, but the media? What an outrage. Who knows, the press may get so mad they won’t laugh at Obama’s jokes during the next White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

This does not bode well for Obama’s second-term agenda. He already had lost a vote over gun control, and the Benghazi hearings didn’t go so well, either.

The focus for the next few months will be on the investigation and likely cover-up of the IRS effort to get dirt on Obama’s political opponents. The initial explanation — that it was the handiwork of just a few rogue IRS workers — sounds about as plausible as blaming the Benghazi attacks on an anti-Muslim video.

Voters should demand to know who was responsible for the IRS witch hunt. If anyone in the White House or Obama campaign was aware of it, then the Richard Nixon and Watergate comparisons will be eerily accurate. It was Nixon, after all, who invented the “enemies list,” and it looks as if someone in the Obama administration’s IRS came up with one.

The disclosures might even trigger a resurgence for the Tea Party movement, which suffered some setbacks in the last election. U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), one of the Tea Party candidates who won, could get a boost all the way to the GOP presidential nomination.

So enjoy the next few months, President Obama. It’s not time yet to get Marine One revved up on the White House lawn, but if you start talking to portraits of dead presidents, then it’s time to get worried.