(
)
The Obama administration’s sudden plunge into scandal territory has two aspects — the actual and the political.
The first, and most important, has to do with what actually happened. Why did the administration promulgate a false account of the terror attack on Benghazi? Why did the Internal Revenue Service target conservative groups for special scrutiny? Why did the Justice Department act in an unprecedented fashion toward The Associated Press for publishing details of a foiled terror plot the White House was planning to discuss openly the next day?
It is inevitable we will find all of this out. On Banghazi, for example, the White House was forced to release 100 pages of e-mails on Benghazi but seems to have left out hundreds more; it will be unable to shield them forever.
CBS News’ Sharyl Attkisson released a highly revealing story on Friday in which administration officials said they regretted not sending a terrorism-response team to Benghazi and regretted not having convened their panel of high-level terrorism advisers afterward. One official told Attkisson, “We’re portrayed by Republicans as either being lying or idiots. It’s actually closer to us being idiots.”
Being an idiot is not a hanging offense, to be sure. Nor is doing everything you can to hide your idiocy six weeks before an election by focusing your ire on a video rather than on the al Qaeda group that killed four Americans. It doesn’t rise to the level of criminality, but it sure is a policymaking scandal, and one about which the American people should have been better informed before they chose a president last November.
That is a scandal, even if no one is going to jail over it.
On the AP story, Attorney General Eric Holder has behaved in an extremely peculiar fashion. He said the AP’s publication of the story put lives at risk when the CIA told the AP there was no security risk involved in publishing it.
Holder also told the media he had formally recused himself from all aspects of the AP investigation — and then had to acknowledge to Congress on Thursday that he had taken no formal steps to do so. In other words, he did not actually recuse himself.
Holder extended the life of that story by behaving as though it is something he wants to stay far away from.
And on the matter shaping up to be the biggest source of woe for the administration, congressional investigators will try to turn the IRS inside out to determine the source of the decisions to put conservative groups under pressure liberal groups did not experience.
And for good reason: In genuinely shocking testimony before Congress on Friday, the outgoing interim commissioner of the IRS said he believed his agency hadn’t targeted conservatives, even though an underling had already apologized for doing so — and then said such targeting would not be illegal in any case.
That congressional process will likely drag out for years, since the Justice Department is also investigating. A DOJ investigation will have the effect of gumming up the works for Congress because no lawyer will allow her client to testify or cooperate with congressional investigators when a criminal indictment is a possibility.
That may prove a very mixed blessing for the Obama second term. It will slow the IRS story down, which is good for Obama, but it will also ensure bits of information about the IRS’s misconduct will dribble out over a very long time, which will be bad. And we may see IRS officials taking the Fifth Amendment in public, which will look very bad indeed.
This is where the political question comes in. What will the impact of these horrible couple of weeks — and the months and years to follow — have on President Obama and his party?
First things first: The president is not at any personal risk here, unless somehow a tape emerges in which we hear the president himself ordering the IRS to crack down on conservatives or to tap the AP’s phones because he was mad that the news organization stole his thunder.
The odds of that happening are slightly worse than the odds you or I will win Powerball. Which is to say, unless something indescribably awful happens between now and January 2017, Obama will finish out his term in office. Conservatives who have allowed themselves to fantasize otherwise and liberals who have allowed themselves to panic at the prospect both need to get a grip.
But while he will not suffer the fate of the disgraced Nixon — or even the fate of Bill Clinton, impeached but not removed from office — Obama does face the very real prospect that his greatest political ambition will not only be unfulfilled but may meet with a buzzsaw.
What Obama wants is to be the leading force behind a wholesale political and ideological realignment in the United States — as enduring in its way as the Republican realignment begun with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980. He was well on his way.
What’s more, early signs for the upcoming midterm elections in 2014 have been remarkably positive considering how badly the president’s party does when it faces the public during his sixth year in office.
Now Democrats are going to have to go home and face voters who will all be aware by the time they go to the polls that the IRS has been doing something called “targeting.”
For Republicans, this is a winner of an issue because the GOP is the anti-tax party and, by inference, the anti-IRS party.
For Democrats, it’s far more complicated; they are in a party that not only wants to increase tax revenues but which wants to use the politically compromised IRS as the key to implementing the unpopular ObamaCare legislation.
What the three Washington stories have in common is their connection to Obama’s 2012 reelection and how people working for him may have lost their way because they were so consumed with securing the second term that they went after conservative groups, went after AP for stepping on a newsmaking story and changed the storyline on Benghazi to benefit him.
And it may have helped — him. But it didn’t help his party; indeed, he hasn’t been of much help to his party in the past two elections, losing Democrats the House in 2010 and having no coattails in 2012.
Now he has loaded his fellow Democrats down with burdens they certainly don’t want to carry going into 2014. If they look disloyal to him, they may anger the Democratic base. But defending the administration on Benghazi will not make them look independent-minded to independents. Defending the AP leak investigation may get the media angry. And let’s not even start with the IRS.
As for Hillary Clinton, the party’s putative standard-bearer for 2016; she may wish she had stayed out of the administration rather than in, that she had kept her powder dry for another presidential run without getting too closely associated with this White House. But she didn’t, and she is, and there we are.