I arrive back in America after a brief sojourn in Blighty to find Obama suddenly floundering. After the bullishness of his State of the Union address just a few months ago, the dreaded second-term blues have struck with brutal suddenness.
It wasn’t enough that the gun control legislation so cherished by his administration appears to have foundered on the rocks of an obstructive congress. Nor that, a couple of weeks ago, the same congress in its infinite recalcitrance allowed the country to fling itself off the sequestration cliff. Nor even that Republican insistence that the State Department’s handling of the Benghazi attacks was mismanaged continues to hang around like a terrible smell on a breezeless day.
First to emerge this week was the bigger scandal: that the Internal Revenue Service has been intentionally targeting right-wing groups, including Tea Party groups for extra and unfair scrutiny, singling them out by name. It is unclear as yet whose initiative this is, but it has rightly caused a storm of outrage from all over the political spectrum.
Punch-drunk and struggling to regain control of the news agenda, Obama demanded – and got – the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner, Stephen Miller on Wednesday, but this appears not to have worked; congressional Republicans have the scent of blood now. If they can prove the White House was encouraging the IRS to target right-leaning political organisations – extremely unlikely though this is – it could be Obama’s Watergate. Much more likely is that such a link won’t be found, but every Republican committee-chair in both houses will be queuing up to take a swing; to grandstand and to drag Obama through the mud.
Enter Representative Darrell Issa, the chairman of the House Oversight Committee, whose hearings this week have shaped him as a sort of nemesis-figure for the administration, and whose new-found fame will only grow as the story develops with him in the limelight.
Just the IRS scandal would have been enough to rock the administration. But the week held more. On Monday it emerged that the Department of Justice had secretly obtained several months’ worth of records from private phone conversations between editors and reporters at the Associated Press as part of an investigation of a leak – an unprecedented liberty to take with the freedom of the press.
In just a couple of days, Obama’s government machine had managed to inflame both their political opponents and the press to apoplexy.
Everyone on the government side, in fact, spent the week furiously buck-passing. At first, Attorney General Eric Holder, up to bat against the inescapable Issa, defended the phone record seizure; then, in exchanges with Issa at the latter’s committee hearings that became extremely heated indeed – at one point Holder dramatically snapped back at Issa, calling his conduct “unacceptable and shameful” – but ultimately shoved the responsibility for ordering the subpoena on his deputy, James Cole.
Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney has spent an unenviable week trying desperately to keep his boss away from both scandals – which has ultimately meant dumping blame on those in the DoJ and the IRS, attacking the Republicans as acting for partisan gains.
He hasn’t been particularly successful. This is the kind of week that can hobble a Presidency. With Issa, revelling in the spotlight, set to grill former IRS commissioner Doug Shulman next week, various committees of both houses of congress are now piling in to add their own investigations, looking for their own slice of the publicity pie. It looks certain that things are going to get worse for the Obama administration before they get better.
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