JUST a few days ago Barack Obama’s administration was being followed around by one substantial scandal, involving the September 2012 terrorist attacks in the Libyan town of Benghazi, which left America’s ambassador and three aides dead. The allegations are both grave and convoluted, but the central Republican charge is that there was a monstrous cover-up: Team Obama put officials on television to claim that Americans were killed by spontaneous protests that turned deadly, rather than in attacks by terrorists that could have been foreseen.
Frustratingly for the right, the Benghazi scandal, though big on conservative radio and TV, has struggled to gain traction beyond core Republicans. Most Americans tell pollsters they are not paying attention, and split along party lines when asked who they believe over Libya.
In part, that is because a Benghazi cover-up has always been a slender reed on which to construct an edifice of Republican outrage. Some senators suggest that it might lead to Mr Obama’s impeachment, and growl that it disqualifies his former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, from ever seeking high office again. But that’s a stretch. The government’s initial response to what happened in Benghazi, as exposed by recently leaked e-mails, does reek of evasion and inter-agency finger-pointing. With the 2012 elections looming, officials feared handing Congress a weapon with which to beat the administration, or being first to admit a harsh truth: that to encourage Libya’s post-Qaddafi rulers, American envoys and spooks were sent to a lethally dangerous city.
But Mr Obama has admitted that American officials died in Benghazi because they were not properly protected and has taken responsibility for those lapses. For proof that Republicans know they do not have enough to hang the president, consider the efforts by members of Congress to improve the scandal. At hearings on the matter in Congress, Republicans have repeatedly asked whether fighter jets or special forces could have been scrambled in time to save lives in Benghazi, but were grounded by faint-hearted superiors. If true, that would indeed be scandalous, but each time the evidence has pointed the other way, leaving Mr Obama’s foes grumbling about “unanswered questions”.
Now Mr Obama has two more substantive scandals to keep and cherish. The first involves astonishing misconduct by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Facing a surge in campaign groups formed during Mr Obama’s first years in the White House, and worried that many were too political to merit tax-exempt status, inspectors hit upon the shortcut of targeting groups with names containing “tea party” or “patriot”. Later, when that triggered complaints of bias, IRS officials switched to scrutinising groups that wanted to change the size of the government or even criticise it, firing off demands to know who led each group, what they were saying in newsletters or on the internet, and even what their members were reading.
Though the government has a right to police overly political non-profit groups, liberal groups appear to have endured less harassment. Worse than wicked, the IRS’s behaviour was stupid: faced by angry citizens with a Don’t Tread On Me loathing of taxes, the agency sent taxmen to tread on them. Mr Obama, so confident in pushing back over Benghazi , has taken a very different line over IRS overreach, calling it “intolerable and inexcusable”. On May 15th the acting IRS boss was told to resign and Mr Obama vowed to work with Congress on new safeguards.
A third scandal involves the Department of Justice, which secretly obtained screeds of telephone records for journalists at the Associated Press (AP) news agency while hunting for the source of leaks about a failed al-Qaeda attack. Unlike the IRS, which—post-Watergate—is supposed to operate at arm’s length from the president’s administration, the Justice Department is under its direct control, and the trawl of journalists’ records seems unusually sweeping. Though that might make the AP scandal sound dangerous, Washington cynics are already suggesting that it may not go very far. Most Americans do not like journalists very much, they note; nor are they keen on officials who leak secrets.
But again, normally defiant allies of the president have been forced onto the back foot. Democratic bigwigs in Congress have called for more complete answers about the AP and IRS sagas, with one complaining that Mr Obama cannot raise the flag and expect supporters to “salute it every time”.
Beneath the noise, a row about government
Republicans have duly pounced, and in doing so executed a neat pivot away from their Benghazi rage. In essence, the real charge driving their Benghazi scandal was one of dereliction of duty, and the insinuation that Mr Obama is too weak (or does not love his country enough) to use American might to keep his own envoys safe. Now Republicans have begun calling him a tyrant, willing to use government power to crush freedoms crafted by the founding fathers. In a twinkling he has gone from a weakling Jimmy Carter to a modern-day George III.
That may be a dizzying turnaround, but it makes political sense. The IRS row is, at a minimum, a gift to Republicans ahead of 2014 mid-term elections, while the AP row deals a double blow to a president who has disappointed supporters over civil liberties before, and suffers from chilly relations with the press.
More broadly, calling Democrats weak on national security used to be a vote-winner. Two costly wars have altered that. This may be the first lesson of the scandals now lapping at the White House door. Spend months attacking Mr Obama for using America’s might too cautiously, as in Libya, and he shrugs it off. Attack him for government overreach, and he is on the defensive. For supporters of an activist government, these are perilous times.