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Jonathan Chait: The Strange Creation of the Obama Scandals
The sudden barometric change in Washington has arrived so rapidly that it is hard to comprehend. “The town is turning on President Obama,” announced Politico honchos and custodians of the conventional wisdom Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, and they’re right. Republicans are gleefully unleashing a vast investigative apparatus; erstwhile supporters like Jon Stewart are mortified. The black clouds may dissipate within a few days or weeks, or they may hover over the White House for the rest of Obama’s term. In the meantime, it is dizzying enough that, even in such a short period of time, we ought to step back and ask, what the hell just happened here?
Scandal is a powerful, yet weirdly amorphous term of art in politics. Conceptually, the division between a scandal and a mere controversy or flub or policy dispute is hard to define. It required a peculiar sequencing of events to transform what would on their own have been normal political controversies into the nebulous, all-encompassing Obama Scandals.
The episode began at dawn last Friday, when ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl broke explosive news about Benghazi. Until that point, the Benghazi story had been confined almost entirely to the right-wing fever swamps, where it lingered as a symbol of Obama’s desire to appease radical Islamists. Karl changed that by reporting that he had obtained the administration’s e-mails, and they showed, in contrast to its claims, a one-sided intervention on behalf of the State Department. Karl’s report produced among mainstream and liberal reporters a sense of embarrassment at having dismissed the story as a weird partisan obsession. “For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession,” wrote Alex Koppelman in a scathing and widely circulated online commentary for The New Yorker, “But now there is something to it.”
On Tuesday, Karl’s Benghazi report began to crumble. Jake Tapper reported that, despite claiming to have “reviewed” the e-mails, Karl had not seen them, but had only seen accounts through third parties, who were almost certainly Republican staffers. (Karl is a good reporter, though sometimes prone to overly credulous coverage of Republicans.) And the accounts of those e-mails misrepresented them, characterizing “extensive input from the State Department” when in fact all the agencies had colluded in a familiar, numbing bureaucratic exercise of finding the lowest common denominator of unobjectionable mush. Factually, Benghazi was back to where it had been before Karl mainstreamed it. As a psychological prod, though, its power was undiminished...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/05/strange-creation-of-the-obama-scandals.html
Scandal is a powerful, yet weirdly amorphous term of art in politics. Conceptually, the division between a scandal and a mere controversy or flub or policy dispute is hard to define. It required a peculiar sequencing of events to transform what would on their own have been normal political controversies into the nebulous, all-encompassing Obama Scandals.
The episode began at dawn last Friday, when ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl broke explosive news about Benghazi. Until that point, the Benghazi story had been confined almost entirely to the right-wing fever swamps, where it lingered as a symbol of Obama’s desire to appease radical Islamists. Karl changed that by reporting that he had obtained the administration’s e-mails, and they showed, in contrast to its claims, a one-sided intervention on behalf of the State Department. Karl’s report produced among mainstream and liberal reporters a sense of embarrassment at having dismissed the story as a weird partisan obsession. “For a long time, it seemed like the idea of a coverup was just a Republican obsession,” wrote Alex Koppelman in a scathing and widely circulated online commentary for The New Yorker, “But now there is something to it.”
On Tuesday, Karl’s Benghazi report began to crumble. Jake Tapper reported that, despite claiming to have “reviewed” the e-mails, Karl had not seen them, but had only seen accounts through third parties, who were almost certainly Republican staffers. (Karl is a good reporter, though sometimes prone to overly credulous coverage of Republicans.) And the accounts of those e-mails misrepresented them, characterizing “extensive input from the State Department” when in fact all the agencies had colluded in a familiar, numbing bureaucratic exercise of finding the lowest common denominator of unobjectionable mush. Factually, Benghazi was back to where it had been before Karl mainstreamed it. As a psychological prod, though, its power was undiminished...
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/05/strange-creation-of-the-obama-scandals.html
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