A Newcomer's Guide to the 3 Obama Scandals

1) Benghazi. As a scandal, this is BS. Of course it was a terrible tragedy. But the efforts to make it into cover-up, deception, or flat-out lying by the White House (based on the difference between "act of terror" and "terrorism") are a kind of birtherism. See here, or here, or here, or here, and after the jump.

2) IRS and Tea Party. This appears to be bad judgment and bad policy. As everyone including Obama seems to have declared as soon as it came up. If there's evidence that Obama or anyone close to him was aware of it, that would be grounds for a "scandal" tone. So far I have not seen indications to that effect. If you'd like some context, see this; and for the closest thing to a defense of IRS policy, from an admitted anti-Tea Party perspective, see this; and for IRS sympathy, this.

3) AP Wiretaps Seizure of Phone Records and Leak Investigation. Now, this is bad, and I say that not simply because the targets are people in my line of work. This is a decision Obama himself appears to have supported -- rather than criticized, as with the IRS -- in a way that reflects badly on him.

What I had thought about Obama, for all his travails, is that he always took the long view historically, and with an awareness of the many informal and delicate balances that hold things together in a society as raucous and disparate as ours. If you think Obama is a socialist, you're already disagreeing -- but remember, this socialist is the first person since Dwight Eisenhower to win more than 51% 50% of the nationwide vote twice. [Ronald Reagan got 50.8% in 1980, and 58.8% in 1984.]

Obama's endorsement of the wiretaps seizure of phone records and investigation suggests surprising blindness to two great and not-very-hidden realities of presidential history. [Sorry, these were not wiretaps.]

One is, secrets always get out. Presidents always hate it, and they always do their best to prevent it. Usually they manage to guard the truly life-and-death, real-time operational details -- for instance, in Obama's case, the suspected whereabouts of Osama bin Laden. But always there are leaks. Always. Always. And they are nearly always less consequential than is alleged at the time.

The other great historical constant is that after-the-fact hunts for leakers always go wrong. That is because they criminalize the delicate but essential relationship between reporters and government officials. The prosecutors always come across as over-reaching and too intrusive. The reporters and their news organizations always end up in a no-win situation: sometimes spending time in jail, often put in financial distress by legal costs, always torn between their professional/personal obligation to maintain confidence with their sources and the demands of prosecutors. And no good purpose is ever served.

Obama should know this. He must know it. He must know that no president looks better in history's eyes for anti-leak prosecutions, and that many look worse. He must know the temptations that work on any president: the temptation to steadily arrogate executive power, to become so resentful of the limits on his power in domestic-legislation fights that he is drawn toward his untrammeled international authority, to slide imperceptibly from his (unavoidable) role as the person who must make countless hard decisions to a sense that his judgment automatically equals what is best for the country. He must know what the open-ended "war on terror" has done to the balance of powers, the fabric of life, and the rule of law in our country. Obama's (and America's) ideal, Abraham Lincoln, infringed heavily on civil liberties in the name of wartime emergency. That war, like Franklin Roosevelt's, had a definable end.

I think Barack Obama has made a bad mistake in endorsing this investigation. It is one of the rare times I question not his effectiveness or tactics but his judgment. I hope he reconsiders.