Reporters Dig Deep around Obama

The day Obama was sworn in as president in 2009, I was in Washington, D.C. at a party for Democratic financiers. It would be an understatement to say that the mood was high. Eight years of George W. Bush were over, a Democrat was in power and what a man he was! Obama was intellectual, charming, a fantastic speaker in the Democratic tradition and most moving of all was his skin color. What a redress for all those African-Americans who had suffered at the hands of white Americans! It was as if JFK had come back to life in a better version, with the right background and admirable private morality.

I ended up talking to a black lawyer from Texas, a man in his seventies. Nothing he had to say was trivial. In the middle of the 1960s, he was a young man in his twenties in the South. Now he was successful in a quiet way and even I, a John McCain supporter, was moved. We fell into conversation.

After a while, I destroyed the mood: “You realize that President Obama will go up for re-election without having closed Guantanamo?”

He brushed this aside, but I was right — and it turned out worse. For the sake of opinion polls, Obama’s administration has lied about Benghazi, where an American ambassador died. Demands have been made for telephone records from The Associated Press, Fox journalists and their relatives. The IRS has harassed legitimate organizations because of their political affiliations. Drones kill civilians in the war against terrorism. The state spies on its own citizens with the help of large Internet companies. And Guantanamo is still open.

What does this mean for the president?

One thing is obvious. When Obama is named, it is more often in association with Nixon than Kennedy. His legacy is sullied by what has happened under his watch. And crucially, his party has a hard uphill struggle before the midterm elections next year when Republicans hope to regain power in the Senate. Some hope that Obama will be brought to justice, but for the moment, the scandals that have been directly connected to the president have not been patently illegal.

However, Obama has shown himself to be a notoriously suspicious president, with serious strains of megalomania, and such traits spread themselves like circular ripples on water to a leader’s staff. Maybe Obama did not issue any orders, but his subjects did what they thought — surely? — the leader wanted. Now hundreds of journalists in the U.S. are digging deeply; dozens of scandalmongers are pondering over what they dare say.

This is far from the tears of joy of January 2009.