Scandal season: What it means for Obama’s presidency

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.

It may be too late for that, said Ramesh Ponnuru in Bloomberg.com. Earlier this month the president urged graduates at Ohio State University not to view government as “some separate, sinister entity,” but “as just the name we use for the things we do together.” But the IRS, AP, and Benghazi scandals make government look less like a friendly community organization, and “more like, well, a separate, sinister entity—and that can’t help the party of government activism.”

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But outside “the conservative echo chamber,” Americans still don’t see Obama as sinister, said Charles Cook in NationalJournal.com. Gallup found this week that only slightly more than half the public says it’s paying attention to the IRS and Benghazi stories—which the pollster says is “comparatively low based on historical measures of other news stories over the last two decades.” Obama’s approval rating actually rose 2 points in a post-scandal CNN poll, to 53 percent. So “although the Republican sharks are circling, at least so far, there isn’t a trace of blood in the water.” In fact, this obsession with faux scandals could backfire on the GOP, said Howard Fineman in HuffingtonPost.com. The party’s fanatics are “bursting with bloodlust,” insisting that Benghazi was worse than Watergate and Iran-Contra combined, and talking openly about impeaching Obama. But to most sane folks it all looks like “a vendetta.” Let’s not forget that when the GOP overreached and impeached Bill Clinton, Democrats picked up five seats in the 1998 midterms, and Clinton’s popularity soared.

“If Obama is both smart and lucky, all three controversies will gradually fade away,” said Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times. “But a season of scandal still comes with a cost.” As Congress spends most of its time on investigations—one third of House committees have already said they will do just that—it will put other issues on the back burner. Tied up in endless hearings, the White House will be constantly on the defensive. And the issues that voters really care about—high unemployment, sequestration, and tax and entitlement reform—will be tossed aside, as Washington once again goes to war with itself.