The IRS mess is edging ever closer to Obama, with the news that his White House counsel and other top administration officials knew about an inspector general investigation into IRS targeting nearly a month ago. But White House spokesman Jay Carney says Obama was not told. "There was nothing the president could or should do" until the official findings were released, he said, and Obama moved fast once that happened last week.

That seems preposterous to some, and has at the least made Obama seem disengaged, but McInturff calls it a plausible scenario. "People don't want to tell the president bad news," he says. "If things get messy, the furthest thing from your mind is, 'Oh, I think the president needs to know about this.' " He says he expects Americans to give Obama the benefit of the doubt, as they have to past presidents. "People say he can't know everything. They don't expect him to. Nobody could."

Of course, that all could change with new information. With Congress in investigative mode on the IRS, the AP incident, and last year's fatal attacks on U.S. personnel in Benghazi, there remains the prospect of more shoes dropping. In the meantime, both parties are claiming political advantage. The trio of controversies is giving the GOP "enormous fuel" in its drive to recruit House and Senate candidates for 2014, McInturff says.

Greenberg sees an empowered tea party that could be instrumental in nominating unelectable candidates--the same problem the GOP has had in the past. "It's a very mixed bag of whether the energy created here helps Republicans," he says. The other problem for the opposition, as Greenberg sees it, is that the GOP probes and rhetoric are landing in a framework of "months and months of Republican gridlock motivated by partisanship." To much of the public, he says, this just seems like more of the same.

The favorability gap between Obama and the Republican Party is substantial, with views of Obama well above 50 percent favorable in most polls and Republicans hovering at 60 percent unfavorable. The generally good impression of Obama is periodically reinforced by events in and out of his control. For instance, his commencement address at Morehouse, a college for black men, was a highly personal speech about overcoming adversity, his own fatherless childhood and his not always constructive race-consciousness, and the need to take personal responsibility to break cycles of poverty and broken families. Clips of the speech on the network news served to remind people not just of the history he represents but of the personal qualities that hold appeal across party lines.

The tornado in Oklahoma is also intruding on the news cycle in a way that shows Obama at his most caring. "The people of Moore should know that their country will remain on the ground, there for them, beside them as long as it takes," he said Tuesday, his words similar to what he said after Hurricane Sandy, the Newtown shootings, the Boston bombings, and the Texas plant explosion.