Scandal season: What it means for Obama’s presidency

As Congress investigates the trio of scandals enveloping Washington, other issues will get put on the back burner.

He’s compared himself to Abraham Lincoln, whipped up nostalgia for John F. Kennedy, and even attempted to emulate Ronald Reagan. But “as his second term stumbles along, the president with whom Barack Obama finds himself being compared is Richard M. Nixon,” said Carl Cannon in RealClearPolitics.com. The three scandals now enveloping the White House have exposed Obama’s Nixonian “fetish for stage managing the news,” and use of investigatory powers against political opponents and troublesome journalists. There’s Benghazi, where his administration tried to hide the involvement of terrorists in the murder of four Americans, since it jarred with Obama’s election-year narrative of a defeated al Qaida. Then it was disclosed that the Internal Revenue Service had targeted Tea Party groups’ applications for tax-exempt status for extra scrutiny. We’ve also discovered that the Justice Department investigated both the Associated Press and a Fox News reporter, in a Nixonian attempt to squash news leaks. (See page 17.) Obama’s credibility is “deeply, probably irretrievably damaged,” said Peggy Noonan in The Wall Street Journal. While the president has not yet been directly tied to these scandals, these agencies work for him, and he sets the tone of government. “If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too.”

“Folks, deep breath time,” said Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post. “This is not the end of the Obama presidency.” Compared with Nixon’s felonious authorization of payoffs and a cover-up of a burglary, George W. Bush’s abandonment of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina, or Ronald Reagan’s sending arms to Iran’s ayatollahs in Iran-Contra, these so-called scandals are kerfuffles. Emails released by the White House last week conclusively show there was no cover-up in Benghazi, just some standard interagency squabbling between the CIA and the State Department. A report by the inspector general on the IRS revealed that its targeting of conservatives was the result of an “ignorant, recalcitrant, and mismanaged bureaucracy,” not a White House-directed campaign against political enemies. But while Obama isn’t a Nixonian “control freak,” said Dana Milbank, also in the Post,Obama’s distant management style seems to have created “a power vacuum in which lower officials behave as though anything goes.” It’s time for “President Passerby” to become a participant in his own presidency.

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