Liberalism not at fault for recent scandals: Column

Kirsten Powers | USATODAY

"When you grow government this big, these kinds of scandals are inevitable, and (President Obama) bears the responsibility for that," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told a group of Virginia Republicans over the weekend. Other conservatives are echoing this view -- that the scandals embroiling the administration undermine Obama's push for an activist "big government."

I guess when you are a hammer, everything looks like a nail. For the GOP, anything that goes wrong in the government is instant proof that the government is too big and that the dark tyranny of liberalism is about to overtake us.

Never mind that there is zero correlation between the political ideology called liberalism and the cascading scandals of the Obama administration. If anything, it's the opposite: it's the undeniably illiberal actions of people within the government that has created these crises. To suggest that any of this happened because the government is too big, or even that the aim of liberalism is to make government bigger, is a gross distortion. Scandals happen under every president, regardless of the size of the government and regardless of the political ideology of the leader of that government.

It so happens that the claim that government is bigger under President Obama than any time in history -- an oft-repeated trope -- is actually not even true. Not counting the military, there were 3,054,000 federal employees in 1988, the last full year conservative standard bearer Ronald Reagan was in office. In 2011, there were 2,756,000 -- a reduction of 10% from Reagan. Even characterizing the IRS scandal as a "big government" problem is silly: less than 200 employees in a single Cincinnati office had to process 60,000 non-profit applications. Government bloat this is not.

What about the Department of Justice spying on reporters in an effort to ferret out whistle-blowers? This would count as a big government intrusion, but it's not liberal. In fact, it's just the kind of expansive government power conservatives have championed and true liberals loathe. There is nothing liberal about Obama's full embrace of the George W. Bush agenda to expand executive power to infringe on American's civil liberties. The fact that there have been so few intellectually honest liberals calling Obama out for this government abuse is not an indictment of liberalism, it's an indictment of the institutional left who behave more like ends-justify-the-means Obama cultists than liberals.

Then there is Benghazi. It is unclear how even the most willfully dishonest person could distort this travesty into an indictment of liberalism or blame it on big government. The fundamental scandal here is that the government scapegoated a private American citizen who made a YouTube video (constitutionally protected free speech) for their inability to protect American embassy workers in Benghazi. Then, to make matters worse, they offered dissembling and contradictory explanations for why they did this and have expressed offense at the mere suggestion they should be transparent about this process. Simple questions such as, "Did the President go to the Situation Room the night of the attack?" are met with blistering outrage.

Whatever happened that night and the weeks following, it's clear that all of the decision-making was centralized among a small cohort of senior government officials. So, to cast this as flowing from an activist government run amok is just wishful thinking on the part of conservatives looking for an anti-liberal theme.

Liberalism is a noble tradition and worldview that is perennially in search of a leader -- and these days even followers -- worthy of its name. If in any of these situations even one person of influence had adhered to the basic tenets of liberalism -- a respect for dissent, free speech, government transparency and liberty -- all of these scandals could have been avoided.

Kirsten Powers is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors, a Fox News political analyst and columnist for The Daily Beast.

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