Failures at the Start of Obama II

He dreamed of a better start. When he gave his second inaugural speech in January, he had great ambitions for his second term. It was a beautiful text, beautifully delivered, with flowery rhetoric and visionary phrases. Four months after the beginning of his second term, U.S. President Barack Obama is grappling with a series of toxic scandals that give Republicans great potential for obstruction and threaten the White House’s political agenda. The most empathic commentators are already making comparisons to Bill Clinton’s difficult second term. Some have already even called up the ghost of Richard Nixon.

In fact, Obama has just had his worst week of 2013. He is being attacked on three different fronts. Initially, it appeared that the Internal Revenue Service, the U.S. tax collection authority, had been particularly targeting conservative groups — for example, those connected to the tea party — on the pretext of examining their request for a special statute of exemption. According to IRS authorities, these zealous background checks were not dictated by political will but were simply aiming at greater efficiency.

But Republicans are outraged. Obama obviously judged such targeting as “scandalous.” He took care to indicate that he did not know anything about it, but the whole business is poisonous. It provides arguments for all those denouncing the liberty-restricting character of the state. It could give renewed energy to the tea party, which has lost its 2010 momentum. It could even bring the tea party and those Republicans who had preferred to keep their distance from the movement closer together.

The second embarrassing affair involves the Department of Justice seizing two months of telephone bills belonging to certain journalists from the Associated Press. The attorney general’s justification for the seizures was the suspicion of an al-Qaida terrorist plot. AP feels that the authorities have violated constitutional guarantees for the press, which adds another charge to the lawsuit against the state inquisitor.

Finally, the third poisonous issue entails the consequences of the terrorist attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, in September 2012. Republicans suspect the White House and the State Department, then led by Hillary Clinton, of having minimized the attack, with the aim of masking the security flaws that facilitated it and avoiding any harm to the president’s reelection. Republicans will not lose sight of the fact that this affair could discredit Hillary Clinton’s candidature in 2016 — yes, in Washington everyone is already thinking about 2016. The Grand Old Party has already managed to prevent the appointment of Susan Rice, U.N. ambassador at the time of the events, as head of the State Department.

What worries many in the Democratic camp is the nonchalance in the White House’s reaction. Obama waited until Wednesday evening to dismiss the head of the IRS, Steven Miller. He contented himself with resurrecting an old bill from 2009 for the protection of journalistic sources and publishing preparatory emails dealing with “linguistic elements” concerning Benghazi.

Alarmed former advisers to Obama and Bill Clinton are recommending that the president set up a crisis center modeled on the one used by Bill Clinton. David Axelrod, one of the president’s closest advisers during his first term, thinks that Obama’s response to targeting by the IRS could have been “more sharp-edged.”* It is in the president’s nature to be careful and to want to know all the ins and outs before commenting, acknowledges Axelrod; however, that is not always the most effective method nowadays. As Mike McCurry, Bill Clinton’s former press adviser stresses, “The environment for communications is so much more complicated now, because you have this voracious social media environment in which everything is magnified.”

In fact, the pieces have already been moved in this American game of political chess. Democratic representatives in Congress have kept their distance from the president, especially those hoping to be reelected in 2014. Moderate Republicans, who until recently appeared to be able to bridge the gap between the two parties at daggers drawn, have suddenly taken a harder line. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, has blasted the IRS. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called one of Obama’s public interventions “disgusting.”** It is becoming more difficult for a conservative to assume the role of conciliator. The president’s hopes for a less partisan legislature during his second term seem to be evaporating each day.

As the publication Politico observes, a third of all committees in the House of Representatives started an investigation into the administration, procedures that will go on forever and contribute to the straining of the political climate. Nonetheless, to forge ahead with his great projects of reform — on immigration, the minimum wage, infrastructures, education, climate — Obama, who has already lost the guns battle, will need the broadest possible support.

At a fundraising gala dinner for the 2014 elections on Monday, the president could not hide his bitterness: “My thinking was when we beat them [the Republicans] in 2012 that might break the fever, and it’s not quite broken yet. But I am persistent.”

For those who might doubt this, he added, “My intentions over the next three-and-a-half years are to govern.”

Points to remember:

Attacked on several fronts, Barack Obama has had his worst week of 2013.

He has been weakened by the revelations of the IRS’s targeted background checks, aimed at conservative groups.

He continues to be reproached for his management of the terrorist attack against the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya last year.

His hopes for a less partisan legislature during his second term seem to be evaporating each day.

* Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.

** Editor’s Note: This quote, while accurately translated, could not be verified.