When the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities held its first Watergate hearing 40 years ago today, it was, by most accounts, a dull affair. Describing five hours of "mostly colorless and snail's-pace testimony," the Washington Post observed that Senate investigators did not seem inclined "to sacrifice thoroughness – or, when necessary, even boredom – for sensationalism, just to hold the TV audience". The New York Times characterized the first day as "low-key," noting that the committee "took pains today to assert dedication to a careful, undramatic search for facts".

The senators were, after all, working with a raft of indisputable material, including the January 1973 convictions of former President Nixon aides G Gordon Liddy and James W McCord, Jr. on charges of conspiracy, burglary, and wiretapping in connection with the June 1972 Watergate break-in, and the April 1973 resignation and firing of other top White House staffers. The senators could afford to be methodical: there had been criminal activity, authorized and carried out at the highest level of the administration, and no amount of grandstanding would further dramatize those already damning facts. The committee set out to establish, in Senator Howard Baker's notorious words, "What did the president know and when did he know it?"

As a trio of scandals converged on the Obama administration this week, and congressional committees announced a series of hearings on the Internal Revenue Service, there have been attempts to compare the IRS and Benghazi controversies to Watergate. But here's the critical fact: there's been no finding of criminal activity in the Obama administration, and the FBI's opening of a criminal investigation of the IRS should lay to rest accusations that the administration has failed to take the matter seriously.

As Carl Bernstein, one of the reporters who broke the Watergate story, pointed out, there is no evidence the president ordered, much less knew about, the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups' tax-exempt applications. The Treasury Department's Inspector General report concluded that despite the fact that IRS personnel had used "inappropriate criteria" to identify which applications to subject to additional review, personnel told the IG that "the criteria were not influenced by any individual or organization outside the IRS".

As Bernstein said:

"In the Nixon White House, we heard the president of the United States on tape saying 'Use the IRS to get back on our enemies.'"

That's not to say that Congress, or criminal authorities, should not investigate further. But Obama has already forced out the acting IRS commissioner. He called the "misconduct" uncovered in the Inspector General's report "an outrage". He promised to "hold the responsible parties accountable," and ordered Treasury Secretary Jack Lew "to ensure the IRS begins implementing the IG's recommendations right away," and promised to work "hand in hand with Congress to get this thing fixed".

Very Nixonian? Yeah, right.

On the other hand, the Justice Department's seizure of the phone records of Associated Press reporters and editors is a real scandal (and more closely "Nixonian" because of the administration's aggressive targeting of whistleblowers, the effort to intimidate the media, and the attempt to suppress information the public has a right to know). So far, though, the AP phone records seizure appears to be generating the lowest decibel level in Congress. And unlike acting IRS Commissioner Steven Miller, Attorney General Eric Holder is still hanging on, despite his disastrous handling of this week's events.

Now, just as the White House's release of the Benghazi emails should end the frenzy over an alleged "cover-up," Republicans have a new jeremiad – not about the Justice Department's frightening civil liberties excesses, but the IRS's bureaucratic bungling, which they dress up as an orchestrated campaign to silence conservatives. Will they note that their Democratic colleagues are equally outraged, and also seek to get to the bottom of it (and, hopefully, more overarching problems with campaign finance)? Or will they feed the conservative claim that the Obama administration is conspiring to deprive conservatives of their constitutional rights?

In contrast to the newspaper reporters of yesteryear yawning through the first Watergate hearings, at the Congressional hearings on the IRS today and next week, reporters will be elbowing each other to "win the morning". Even if there's a yawn of a story, there will have to be a story with political machinations at its core, or at least a listicle of the 17 ways the IRS is like Watergate, or the ten reasons why Obama is more Nixonian than Nixon.

The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, not known under the chairmanship of Darrell Issa (R-CA) for "dedication to a careful, undramatic search for facts," is not likely to prove itself a worthy heir of the Watergate oversight era. It has already set out the foregone conclusion of next week's hearing: "The IRS: Targeting Americans for Their Political Beliefs." That hearing, at least, won't be about bureaucratic fecklessness or, heaven forbid, why groups with an aim of influencing the outcome of elections should have the same tax-exempt status as your local volunteer fire and rescue squad.

The IRS scandal does offer a Watergate-esque opportunity: to reform campaign finance law in favor of increasing transparency and reigning in the role of big (and secret) money in political campaigns. Although the IRS's method of screening out applicants for social welfare group tax exempt status – by looking for keywords "tea party," "patriot," or "9/12" – was wrong, the IRS employees were working with little guidance on how to determine which applicants' activities would be at least 50% political, thus making them ineligible for tax-exempt status.

As the IG found, the determinations unit faced a raft of new "social welfare" group applications, the number of which doubled between 2009 and 2012. Such groups have been infusing more and more money into political campaigns: according to the Center for Responsive politics, candidate-oriented campaign spending from tax-exempt groups jumped from $133m in 2010 to $315m in 2012.

But insufficient oversight and guidance from management left IRS employees without criteria for determining what constituted political activity, and how they should determine which applicants were engaged in an impermissible level of political activity to be eligible for tax-exempt status. The employees, the IG found, "showed a lack of knowledge" of what activities are allowed by tax-exempt organizations and considered the tea party criterion as "a shorthand term for all potential political cases" because there was no other system for making these determinations.

If this scandal prompts Congress to pass some meaningful reform of the tax and campaign finance laws, then it would, in that sense, be comparable to Watergate. But it appears far more likely to turn into a spectacle of political grandstanding – and, absurdly enough, opportunistic political fundraising.