Ranting On...the Political Implication of Scandals

As you may have noticed, I've been hanging back a bit on the three scandals that are plaguing the President and Washington at the moment, mostly because I wanted to gain a little bit of perspective on them.  The GOP has so many different talking points out there, the president, slow on the response, didn't get his rebuttal in, and quite frankly I wanted to wait and see what we did and didn't know.

From the looks of things, we've learned a great deal in the past week, and while I'm going to hold-off a bit on what we don't know yet (as it isn't prudent to discuss things we don't know, despite the media's insistence that every Republican shouting "impeachment" is worth listening to), I think it's important for us to take a real look at the political impact of these scandals, and how dangerously the media is reacting to them.

Let's start with the actual scandals themselves: the attacks in Benghazi, the IRS investigations into the Tea Party-associated political groups, and the Justice Department's secret seizure of the Associated Press's phone records.  Of the three, from a political standpoint, the IRS scandal is definitely the most damning politically.  The reason for this is both that it's the easiest to understand (the nuances of Benghazi, coupled with the reasons behind the seizure of the AP's phone records), and that it has the most meat left to it.

Benghazi would seemingly be the most logical place for the Republicans to start, but in the past year, they've largely thrown this scandal to the red-meat wolves within their party, and it's nearly impossible for them to bring up Benghazi without it appearing overly partisan.  For starters, with the release of the emails, we've learned that while there were arguments between the State Department and the CIA over talking points, this was done at a much lower level than the President or Secretary Clinton.  Some may say "guilt by association" or "the buck stops here" works politically in this regard, but that's not really going to play since they've already used a lot of their traction with the scandal to keep Susan Rice out of running Foggy Bottom, despite the fact that, as the emails suggest, Rice was largely an innocent victim in the scandal.

Secondly, the scandal has become so partisan that it's difficult to see the Republicans gaining a significant amount of leverage out of it.  The reason it didn't play very long in the campaign season last year was that the Republicans jumped to too many conclusions-assuming a political coverup, and wanting desperately to throw it in a kitchen sink mode of an election that was slipping away from them.  The result was that they looked too political in the death of four Americans, and it likely cost them rather than have Obama lose credibility with voters and Americans.  Also, as Jon Stewart pointed out this week, when your mouthpieces about a scandal are Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, who started a ten-year war based on bad intel, you lose most of your ability to have shocked indignation.

The IRS scandal and the AP scandals both make the Obama administration look partisan and contribute to a "government-overreach" narrative, and so they are instantly more damaging to the President and those around him.  The Democrats are going to have to take a few bad news cycles out of this, but if you take an objective look at it, the Democrats seem to be in a far more controlled state than the Republicans.  Provided that no one outside of the IRS (the President, Geithner, or a top advisor) is implicated in the scandal, the Democrats plan of having members of Congress sharply go after the IRS specifically and Obama demanding the resignation of Steven Miller is likely the best steps that they can take to quell the majority of Americans (though Sarah Hall Ingram likely needs to go too).

The rest of the Democrats strategy is going to be to wait for the facts, and hope that the Republicans overplay their hand, which is looking more and more likely by the day.  Though it isn't of the severe nature that the Lewinsky scandal had on the country (the nation has not been following the scandals in the same fashion they did when Monica became one of the most famous people on earth in the matter of a week), the Republicans have not had a unified message on the scandal, and are starting to run into a "boy who cried wolf" situation.  You have people like Sen. Rand Paul proclaiming that Hillary Clinton shouldn't be president as a result of the Benghazi attacks, a comment that wreaks of political opportunism from a man who has been running for President since before he won his Senate seat.  You have Sen. Jim Inhofe and Gov. Mike Huckabee proclaiming impeachment is imminent.  You have multiple people comparing him with Nixon, despite many of the party's chief leaders (amongst them Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld) had a significant role in the Nixon White House (hey if the GOP is playing the guilt by association card, it's fair game).  While they may be on the fringe within their respective caucuses, titles like senator and governor imply credibility and the "party leader" label, and this is seen as overreaching.

Part of this is that the American people don't want an impeachment.  They just elected President Obama, and to impeach over something that we have yet to prove that he lied about or initiated (for the IRS scandal) is overreaching, and would be read by the casual observer as a rebuke more of their choice of Obama over Romney last November than a thoughtful and reluctant use of congressional power.  Reince Preibus even said this this past week, saying that evidence was needed before discussing impeachment.  The fact that this had to come up, though, makes it seem as if the impeachment-jumping damage has already been done.

There is also the serious risk of hyperbole, made all the worse by this being a long-line of scandals that are of questionable outrage that have come up in the past five years.  Everything from the Fast and Furious to birth certificate outrage has been lobbed at Obama over the past five years, and so unless there is something truly damning that comes out of these investigations, it's difficult seeing this escaping partisan lines.  Peggy Noonan's article yesterday proved how desperate the GOP is to make this an impeachable, destroy-the-Democrats sort of defense, comparing the IRS scandal to Watergate, and saying it is the worst Washington scandal since then.  Never mind the U.S. Attorney firings.  Or the lack of WMD's in Iraq.  Or the Lewinsky scandal.  Or Iran-Contra, which managed to implicate a Secretary of Defense and National Security Advisor before pardons were rushed out.  This, a scandal that the IRS took longer on forms for the Tea Party (all of which were eventually approved), and where the highest-ranking official to be removed from office (due to resignation, not criminal charges) is someone no one outside of DC city limits had ever heard of is somehow bigger than all of those scandals.

The fact is that the Republicans were calling Benghazi Watergate before suddenly the IRS was Watergate.  This jumping to conclusions before getting any actual facts has hurt them dramatically in the past, and will continue to do so again.  Your average American voter doesn't want a political party that instantly cries "impeachment!" the second a scandal, no matter the level or the involvement of the upper echelons of the administration, is brought up, and though it shouldn't be a part of this (as, theoretically, politicians should do their jobs without trying to profiteer off of them for electoral advantage), this isn't the cut-and-dry situation for the Republicans that the media has been willing to paint it.  Yes, today you'd rather be in John Boehner/Mitch McConnell's corner, but let's not forget what the Republicans did in 1998, when they impeached a president the country didn't want to impeach, and as a result nearly lost the House.  People like Rep. Jon Fox and Rep. Rick White lost almost certainly as a result of the Clinton impeachment hearings, and the Democrats bucked historical trends to gain seats in the House, despite the six-year-itch.  And if you want to find a way to motivate voters who only vote in presidential elections (primarily younger and minority voters), try taking out the President they overwhelmingly elected twice.

This isn't to say that the President isn't at some risk politically, but not from being removed from office, or even at this juncture, in losing an election.  Were it May of 2014, I'd say we could be in for a rough ride, but it's eighteen months until the next elections-ten lifetimes in politics.

Instead, it's the president's agenda that is in trouble.  Unless the Democrats are able to pull off the miracle and get Nancy Pelosi elected Speaker in 2015, Obama's lame duck clock is ticking.  Granted, I don't think he's "done" as some have proclaimed him (part of me wants to metaphorically punch the media for saying this, as they're contributing more to the laziness of Congress with these sorts of stories than they are commentating on them), but there is a limited amount of time that you have to enact major legislation on immigration, the budget, health care, the environment, and gun control over the next year, and there are millions of Americans who voted for the President and are counting on him to get this legislation through with all he's got.

And this is perhaps the greatest and most devestating aspect of the President's career, and the one that I am most upset by every time I hear bellyaching about him, as it's the one I most side against him on; the President can counter that he doesn't have a Congress that will work with him, but a strong part of that is on him.  The President, particularly when it started becoming apparent in 2008 and 2012 that he was cruising to a win, should have used more of his political muscle and stunning GOTV efforts to help Democrats further in 2008, 2010, and 2012.  The fact that he hogged DNC funds in 2012, that he has been practically invisible on the campaign trails over the past five years when he wasn't stumping for himself (compare that to a President Bush in 2002 and 2004, who knew that he needed a Congress to help him win), and you have part of what is causing these issues in Washington right now.  For example, there is no reason Obama couldn't have spared some more time for Shelley Berkley in Nevada in 2012 (he outran her by nearly eight points-clearly some more involvement from his ground team there would have made the difference).  Ted Strickland and Alex Sink both lost by two-points or less in states that Obama delivered both times.  We lost unforgivably close races for the Senate in Pennsylvania and Illinois (Illinois!) in 2010 that he should have had his team working on the ground for every day in liberal bastions driving up the votes.  These Senate and governor's seats cost us severely heading into Obama's second term (imagine how much more effective the Democrats would be if they had controlled redistricting in Florida and Ohio, or what a 58-42 Senate would be able to do for the Democratic agenda right now).  He still has the chance to do this right, as 2014 is a big year for Democrats with opportunities (particularly in governor's races) in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Florida, all states that the President won twice, but it would have been far, far better had he realized earlier on in his career that a Democratic Senate, House, and friendly Democratic territory across the country was just as important to everyone who voted for him as him winning the White House.  One of the biggest issues the Democrats have always faced is that they are not as good in a midterm at driving up their base as the Republicans are, and it's going to take a Democratic president who knows the vital nature of truly getting out into retail campaigning for Democratic candidates (again, similar to GW Bush in 2002 and 2004) to start to break down that thought process.

So, that's where I'm sitting right now on these scandals.  Obviously, there will be investigations and more gleeful dancing over at FOX News before all of this is done, but right now I think the Democrats best course-of-action is to wait-and-see.  Unless the scandals reach higher levels of government, this has yet to be the sort-of-scandal that is anything more than media-filler and red-meat for driving the GOP base (and making the President look bad), but we shall see what comes of them over the upcoming weeks.