http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/ma ... -lame-duck
Beleaguered Obama looks to fight back as critics ask: is he a lame duck already?
IRS, AP, Benghazi … this past week, the president has been forced to confront a series of damaging scandals that could derail his second term before it has really begun
Beleaguered Obama looks to fight back as critics ask: is he a lame duck already?
Paul Harris contributor jan 2013
Paul Harris in New York
guardian.co.uk, Friday 17 May 2013 14.00 BST
Barack Obama: the new Nixon? Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images
It is not a comparison that many people thought would ever get much traction.
But, assailed this week by multiple scandals and at the mercy of a furious press, President Obama has endured a legion of pundits wondering if he is the 21st-century Richard Nixon – and whether his second term is already a lame-duck disaster.
Certainly conservative writers have leapt at the idea that the now beleaguered Obama can be mentioned in the same breath as the shamed 37th president who left office early after the Watergate scandal.
They have looked at revelations that the Internal Revenue Service singled out conservative groups and that the Justice Department targeted AP journalists in a secret sweep of their phones as signs that Obama's administration is paranoid and over-reaching its power. Then they have added a healthy dose of outrage over whether or not the White House manipulated reaction to the death of four Americans in an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Libya.
"Benghazi, IRS – son of Watergate?" wrote conservative writer Cal Thomas amid a plethora of similar headlines. But it was not just the right wing. Liberal Democrat congressman Michael Capuano reacted to the IRS reports by saying: "There's no way in the world, I'm going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing."
Indeed, even Buzzfeed used an animation of Obama's face morphing into Nixon's.
Long-time Washington observers have been shocked at how rapidly it seems that Obama's second term appears to have come off the rails. It has been barely six months since he was celebrating a comfortable win over Republican challenger Mitt Romney in the 2012 election and delighting his liberal base with a promise of four years of progress and reform.
"It has been downhill since the state of the union address in February, and it is going to be a tough road from here on in for him. It is a very bleak period for the White House," said Professor David Cohen, a political scientist at the University of Akron.
The three scandals that have dominated the headlines this week – the IRS, the spying on AP and the latest Benghazi revelations – have also only added to series of other problems that the Obama White House has encountered as it seeks to map out a meaningful second term.
Obama has been hit by intense criticism from his liberal base and rightwing Republicans over his enthusiastic use of unmanned drones to kill suspected Islamist militants abroad. A hunger strike at Guantánamo Bay has also highlighted his failure to fulfil a long-standing promise to close the controversial base. Finally, in the wake of the tragic Newtown school shooting, Obama staked a huge amount of political capital on tightening gun controls. Yet, despite huge public backing, he was defeated by intense lobbying from the gun industry.
It has added up to a sense, for some, that Obama's second term has been cut adrift and is watching its influence drain away. "His lame-duck status has come a couple years early. The defeat on the gun control issue was a real embarrassment," said Cohen.
Experts say that Obama's problems lie not so much with a newly galvanised Republican party that scents political blood in the water, but with his own Democratic party. As the White House becomes increasingly distracted and focused on damage control – for example, suddenly releasing a 100 emails linked to Benghazi on Wednesday and sacking the IRS chief – its ability to keep its own members of Congress disciplined diminishes.
With half an eye on the mid-term elections of 2014, many Democrats will now be wary of being too closely linked to a scandal-tainted Obama. Getting them to vote to pass the White House's desired legislation will be difficult. "It is going to be harder for him to rally his own party to get behind him. A president's power always diminishes with each day of a second term but a scandal speeds up that process," said Larry Haas, a political commentator and former aide in the Clinton White House.
The situation is also likely to get worse. The Republican party controls the House of Representatives and so has the power to hold committee hearings and issue subpoenas as part of investigations it chooses to pursue on any of the scandals. It has already this week publicly grilled attorney general Eric Holder on the IRS and AP situations – setting a tone that is likely to be repeated in the months to come and ensure the scandals get regular boosts of life.
"The House will continue to have investigation after investigation. This will be going on for years," said Steve Mitchell, a Republican political pollster and founder of Mitchell Research.
However, there are some who warn that the tides of Obama's political fortunes could turn again. He still wields a lot of power in the White House, including the ability to push an agenda using presidential executive orders.
He is also likely to still be able to pursue his ambitious aim of securing immigration reform as a landmark achievement of his second term to match his healthcare law during his first period in office.
Mindful of demographic changes and the fast-growing power of Hispanic voters, many Republicans are aware that signing up with immigration reform is good politics for their party. They are unlikely to let a desire to win political points over a weakened Obama get in the way of the broader aim of improving their image with Hispanic communities.
"The politics of immigration changed dramatically after the presidential election. That continues to be the case. Both parties want to do it," said Haas.
