Artur Davis: Obama’s Scandalous Seven Days in May

No, the Obama Administration’s disaster of a week is not Watergate. Not unless Barack Obama is found scheming with his aides about how to pay “hush money” to witnesses. Not unless the foraging of journalists’ phone logs included eavesdropping with wiretaps. No unless revelations surface that Obama ordered a federal agency to shut down a criminal investigation, or that he skimmed campaign funds to build his own private network of thieves and vandals.

But this appalling seven days need not be Watergate to be something lethal and destructive of the public trust, a cascade of events that has hardened and validated the worst characterizations of this White House. The axiom on the political right that Obama’s presidency threatens constitutional freedom could seem overwrought when it was confined to insurance mandates and gun background checks. But from now on, the brief has just gotten appallingly straightforward: it sweeps in elements that are at the core of the First Amendment, in the form of the IRS digging into filers with the wrong politics, and into groups with an unapproved ideological agenda. The case that liberties are being violated—pirating the links between certain reporters and their sources for over two months, and in such an indiscriminate manner that close to a 100 working reporters might have been compromised—no longer seems to the media the stuff of right-wing paranoia.

The supposedly partisan charge that the Obama Administration was covering up details in the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi takes on more plausible colors when a diplomat describes the way he was beaten down by political appointees for asking hard questions. And the vague but toxic insinuation that high level negligence contributed to their deaths now has chilling specific details: one official’s account of a special operations rescue team being bluntly shut down when it was poised to strike, another’s description of an inter-office climate that minimized safety concerns about the American consulate as unseemly griping.

Obama has maddened his adversaries by only repeating his routine for handling public storms: indignation that his White House’s motives are questioned, and an implication that parts of the executive branch, in this case the IRS, are an island beyond his ability to influence. For his political acolytes, the effect is good righteous theater. Never mind the inconvenience that the IRS’ presidentially appointed leadership knew of political targeting, failed to stop it, and may have implicitly blessed it. Forget that the ugliness of his subordinates’ response to Benghazi is a picture supplied by members of his own government, not by his opponents but by professionals, people who until these events were trusted comrades of the appointees who ended up sacking or maligning them.

Is there a way of understanding why a campaign whose vanity in 2008 was built around its elevation from the drab of ordinary politics has morphed into a presidency that has been caught mimicking so many high and low level political abuses in Obama’s lifetime?   Much of this, I think, is the vaunted self regard on the part of Obama’s loyalists that I have seen up close, the arrogance that downgrades criticism as dumbness, extremism, or jealousy. Add to this the conceit by this White House that its enemies really are unprecedented, and that they don’t deserve the full truth, much less a confession of error. And lastly, and very much on display in the IRS fiasco, there is the inevitability that this administration’s bureaucrats will take to heart its own vision, which is so quick to denigrate right-leaning ideologies as a subversive fringe. (A point Ross Douthat effectively made in his Sunday column).

It is not that Obama is the beleaguered Nixon, scribbling on his notepad about how to wreck his adversaries, or that today is the wiretapped, war absorbed early seventies. No, Obama and company are doing damage their own way: with a smile that masks a smirk, with the cloak of high-mindedness, all in the service of routing any smaller nuisance that gets in the way. Certain basic, democratic values may well not recognize the difference.

(Cross-posted with OfficialArturDavis.com)