Obama’s critics are weaving four discrete episodes into a single storyline. Obama's dangerous new narrative

No contemporary American politician has benefited more from the power of good storytelling than Barack Obama. He vaulted from obscurity to the presidency on the power of narrative — invoking his biography and personal values to make a larger point about how he would lead the nation.

So presumably no one understands more vividly than Obama and his close aides just how toxic and potentially paralyzing his situation has become this spring, as four distinct ethical and policy controversies have simultaneously converged.


Obama’s critics now have a narrative — a way of connecting four discrete episodes to a larger point about this president’s leadership style and values. In other words, they didn’t merely happen on his watch but were in important ways caused by his watch.

And for the first time, this anti-Obama storyline is being presented in a way that might seem reasonable to people who are not already rabid anti-Obama partisans.

( PHOTOS: 10 slams on the IRS)

The narrative is personal. The uproars over alleged politicization of the IRS and far-reaching attempts to monitor journalists and their sources have not been linked directly to Obama. But it does not strain credulity to suggest that Obama’s well-known intolerance for leaks, and his regular condemnations of conservative dark-money groups, could have filtered down to subordinates.

The narrative is ideological. For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview.

( Also on POLITICO: Watchdog: IRS used ‘inappropriate criteria’)

To stain reputations, presidential controversies usually need some kind of powerful connection to the style and values of the person occupying the Oval Office. Watergate was not a random scandal — it flowed directly from President Richard M. Nixon’s paranoia and contempt for law. No one who knew Bill Clinton in the decades before he became president would have been surprised that his second-term scandal involved weaknesses of the flesh. Under George W. Bush, the misjudgments at the outset of the Iraq War reflected an instinct for certitude and a disdain for dissenting views that started at the top.

In Obama’s case, the narrative emerging from this tumultuous week goes something like this: None of these messes would have happened under a president less obsessed with politics, less insulated within his own White House and less trusting of government as an institution.

( Also on POLITICO: D.C. turns on Obama)

There is little doubt that Obama and Democrats would be making precisely this argument if the same set of controversies had descended on a Republican president. And the hope and expectation on the right is that the barrage of alarming headlines out of Washington will prompt Americans to make a top-to-bottom reassessment of what they thought they knew about their president.

This time, said conservative economist Douglas Holtz-Eakin, voters may look with deeper suspicion on Obama and government-growing policies they have previously viewed as benign.

“In the 2010 midterms, there was a successful narrative that said: the middle class is suffering and the problem is government overreach. But that faded [and] now it’s back with a much more sinister over-face,” Holtz-Eakin said, suggesting Obama would suffer to the extent voters consider these scandals and conclude “the tone is set at the top.”

“If you spend most of your time on politics, the tone that’s set throughout the federal agencies really is, politics is paramount,” continued Holtz-Eakin, who heads the nonprofit American Action Forum. “If you think about a generic argument about Obamacare — which happens to be true — is that it’s going to run an enormous amount of American insurance and health care decisions through D.C., that no longer sounds benign.”

(In a Monday MSNBC appearance, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich made the argument like so: “Why would you trust the bureaucracy with your health if you can’t trust the bureaucracy with your politics?”)

The potential impact of that narrative is evident even to Democrats who fundamentally reject the charge that Obama has been passive in the face of missteps and misjudgments down the chain of command.

Ed Kilgore, the former vice president of the Democratic Leadership Council, said he fears the convergence of damaging storylines will add up to something greater than the sum of their parts — something that bears a distressing resemblance to the right’s existing narrative of life under a jack-booted Democratic president.

“The biggest picture [view] is that this reinforces the whole conservative argument that Obama, or liberalism in the day of Obama, or however you want to call it, represents something new and menacing. ‘It’s not just Nixon all over again, it’s 20 times worse,’” said Kilgore, who clearly does not subscribe to that view.

“What is the distinctive political phenomenon of the last four to five years? Is it a radicalized Republican Party, which is what people like me write every single day? Or is it this lurch to the left, this hungry welfare state that’s now so out of control and is threatening our liberties?” he asked rhetorically. “This many data points for the latter point of view is going to be very hard for Republicans to resist. The temptation to go crazy on this is made all the more powerful by the timing, going into a midterm election.”

The fact that these controversies all arrive simultaneously could also help Republicans pass a fairness test that previously has thwarted them. Last fall, Republicans devoutly believed the Benghazi terror attack and its aftermath showed White House malfeasance and mendacity. A majority of Americans apparently believed that it was more plausibly a tragedy that didn’t speak to larger administration defects.

Obama’s offering a variation on that defense this time around. He released a statement on the IRS scandal Tuesday night blasting “IRS personnel” for their conduct and stating that his administration expects “everyone who serves in the federal government to hold themselves to the highest ethical and moral standards.”

“The IRS must apply the law in a fair and impartial way, and its employees must act with utmost integrity. This report shows that some of its employees failed that test,” Obama said, emphasizing that he views this as an aberration within the executive branch.

But in the current atmosphere of multi-ring uproars, it is easier to make a case that a mindset of inattention to governing detail and excessive attention to politics was at work in the State Department on Benghazi, and the IRS on investigation of tea party groups, even if Obama isn’t shown to be directly involved.

For the bulk of his time in office, Obama has been all but impervious to scandal: Long before Americans ever heard of Benghazi, the GOP was laboring to convince the country that other botched government actions signaled something deeper and more disturbing about the Obama administration. But they met with little success in their efforts to pin blame on Obama — for the fumbled gun-walking initiative Fast and Furious, for example, or the failed, government-subsidized green energy company Solyndra.

In 2012, those attacks were simply too dissonant for an electorate that found the flesh and blood Obama more than likable enough, and a far cry from the cartoon villain depicted in Republican television ads.

What’s more, Republicans have struggled more broadly to convince voters that federal power — in the abstract — menaces them personally. While the GOP rode a wave of economic discontent to success in the 2010 midterms, they ran head-on two years later into the limitations of a message of austerity and government restraint.

Conservatives fumed throughout 2012 at the ease with which the president turned the Republican arguments about deficits and debt on their head, accusing his opponents of scheming to shred the most popular government programs, such as Medicare and law enforcement.

If Americans have historically been skeptical of Big Government, they weren’t hostile to the version Obama offered up in his reelection campaign.

That’s not to say that voters’ comfort with government power has increased under Obama. According to most indicators, the opposite has happened.

A Pew survey released in January found that just 26 percent of voters said they “can trust government always or most of the time.” Fifty-three percent said the federal government “threatens [their] personal rights and freedoms” — the first time that statement has earned majority support, according to Pew.

Still, that plummeting perception of government power hasn’t yet taken a deep political toll on Obama, a proud cheerleader for the social value of a robust federal government.

Whatever the political consequences of the IRS and AP scandals for Obama, they likely help create an atmosphere for debate that helps the right, said conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru.

“Conservatives always sort of think about the government in terms of the DMV and the IRS and want people to think about it that way. Liberals tend to think about it more as the fire department and Social Security. This story makes people think about government in a way that conservatives like,” Ponnuru said of the IRS controversy.

Former George W. Bush adviser Peter Wehner, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, said of this week: “I’m not sure it’s an inflection point, but it’s a big moment.”

“The conservative case for limited government, and the conservative case against Big Government, probably got a big boost,” Wehner said, cautioning: “It’s hard to tell what the effects are going to be on the public, because I think the public’s views are pretty settled. I think they tend to be for limited government, but they’re not libertarians.”

Democrats remain skeptical that these embarrassments — and few in the party dispute that they are embarrassments — – will have longer-range political implications for Obama. The president has weathered any number of media firestorms that seem mortally important in the immediate term but quickly fade into the background (Does anybody remember the Ground Zero mosque? How about Sestak-gate? No?)

The surer bet, said Matt Bennett, vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, is that the party will have even more ground to make up when it comes to persuading Americans to believe that government can be a positive good.

“My view is that when Obama said, we’re going to have the most open and transparent and ethical government in history, he absolutely meant every word of that and means it today. But the government is a gargantuan, sprawling enterprise that does stupid things every day and some of that comes to light. Because all big enterprises do stupid things,” Bennett said.

He continued: “From Obama’s perspective and from the perspective of Democrats running for president in the future, it is very, very hard to figure out how to stop this kind of thing, because it’s probably not doable.”