President Asterisk

Why the Obama IRS scandal may be worse than "a cancer on the presidency."

By 

JAMES TARANTO

May 17, 2013

No one can deny that Barack Obama is a highly skilled politician, at least by the measure of election outcomes. His record is undefeated, save for an ill-advised 2000 primary challenge to an entrenched incumbent congressman. His 2008 presidential victory, after a fraction of a term in the U.S. Senate, was especially dazzling. It disproved those who said that Hillary Clinton was invincible, that a left-wing Democrat couldn't win, and that America wasn't ready for a black president.

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No one can deny that Lance Armstrong and Mark McGwire were highly skilled athletes. But their accomplishments are forever tainted by their use of banned performance-enhancing drugs. The use of the Internal Revenue Service's coercive power to suppress dissent against Obama is the political equivalent of steroids. The history books should record Obama's re-election with an asterisk to indicate that it was achieved with the help of illicit means.

The Weekly Standard notes that NBC's Lisa Myers "reported this morning that the IRS deliberately chose not to reveal that it had wrongly targeted conservative groups until after the 2012 presidential election":

The IRS commissioner "has known for at least a year that this was going on," said Myers, "and that this had happened. And did he share any of that information with the White House? But even more importantly, Congress is going to ask him, why did you mislead us for an entire year? Members of Congress were saying conservatives are being targeted. What's going on here? The IRS denied it. Then when--after these officials are briefed by the [inspector general] that this is going on, they don't disclose it. In fact, the commissioner sent a letter to Congress in September on this subject and did not reveal this. Imagine if we--if you can--what would have happened if this fact came out in September 2012, in the middle of a presidential election? The terrain would have looked very different."

One thing we have learned from the IRS scandal is that sports journalists are morally superior to political journalists. Whereas the former understand that cheating is an assault on the basic integrity of the sport, the latter all too often treat it as if it were just part of the game.

NewsBusters.org notes the exchange on NBC's "Today" yesterday between hostess Savannah Guthrie and White House correspondent Chuck Todd:

Guthrie: And very quickly, I read a headline yesterday that said Republicans see blood in the water. That they see a president who's very vulnerable politically. Is there a danger that they will overreach?

Todd: There is. I mean, that's what happened to Republicans in 1998 with Bill Clinton. And if all of Congress is focusing on hearings to do scandals, the voters will punish them. They've done it in the past.

The Associated Press's Julie Pace "reports" that Obama's desultory efforts to remedy the IRS and Benghazi scandals "did little to satisfy Republicans, who see the controversies as an opportunity to derail Obama's second-term agenda." She offers no evidence to back up that characterization of the Republicans' motives. Maybe there's some clue in her phone records.

National Journal, one of the leading Beltway trade publications, put out not one, not two, but three articles yesterday arguing that his current plague of scandals would help Obama. "Obama used the joint press conference to open a new political offensive on Benghazi," wrote Jill Lawrence. "He challenged lawmakers--read: Republicans--to put their money where their mouths are on Benghazi and protect Americans at risk overseas."

Ronald Brownstein claims that because the administration's scandalous behavior will "enrage the GOP base," the "storms . . . will likely weaken . . . Republicans who believe the party must reboot to restore its competitiveness for the White House." Again, there's the hopeful example of 1998-99: "The Clinton impeachment captures the dynamic." Somehow Obama's media cheerleaders have forgotten the talking point back then: that Bill Clinton's perjury and obstruction of justice were "only about sex."

And Norm Ornstein actually goes out on a limb and defends the IRS:

If the IRS or the White House were intent on going after Republicans and conservatives who were using 501(c)4 status to influence elections, why would they leave American Crossroads GPS and the American Action Network alone, each organizations that made no bones about their use of the status simply to hide their donors?

Because, Ornstein answers, the IRS "at its leadership level was probably cowed by the likelihood that doing its job against these organizations would be met by fierce criticism from Mitch McConnell, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and many others."

Flattering as it is to think that we and our colleagues wield that sort of power, in fact the answer is simpler. The American Action Network was approved in April 2010. That was just in the nick of time, for according to the inspector general's timeline, the IRS began gearing up its effort to suppress dissident 501(c)(4)s in "March-April" of that year.

Ornstein's claim that IRS left Crossroads GPS alone is grossly ignorant. As we noted Tuesday, in December 2012 the IRS illegally leaked the organization's still-unapproved application to the left-leaning website ProPublica.org.

The Onion yesterday had a funny riff on the subject:

Amid mounting scrutiny . . . Obama supporter Jake Maynard reportedly devised a perfectly implausible explanation Thursday that frees the president from any blame. "Look, he's the President of the United States of America; how could he possibly be involved in or aware of every single high-level action taken by the prominent government agencies he oversees?" said Maynard, noticeably perspiring as he explained the completely illogical reason why the President of the United States will emerge from this week's scandals unscathed. . . . Maynard, whose voice quavered several times during his asinine explanation, ended his perfectly invalid defense of the president by stressing that this was all politics and that "none of this would even be happening if the president were someone other than Obama."

These are times that try satirists' skills, for the Onion barely scooped the editorialists ofNew York Times, who in today's paper make Jake Maynard's argument, only it's funnier by virtue of being intended in all seriousness:

For Senator Mike Lee of Utah, these incidents proved that the federal budget has to be cut even more deeply. "We need to return it to a simpler, more manageable government," he said, "because that's the only way that we're ever going to prevent things like this from happening."

There are no "things like this," beyond a coincidence of bad timing. But they do have one thing in common: when bound together and loudly denounced on cable television and in hearings, they serve to obscure the real damage that Republicans continue to do to the economy and the workings of government.

As Brian Jones tweeted: "When your job is to carry water for the administration, everything looks like a bucket."

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman took a few minutes out of his vacation to write on his New York Times blog that "it seems that there weren't actually any scandals, just the usual confusion and low-level mistakes that happen all the time, in any administration." He bases this on a Washington Post blog post from Journolist founder Ezra Klein, who claimed late yesterday morning that "the scandals that could reach high don't seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don't reach high enough."

The IRS scandal falls into the latter category, Klein claims:

If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit's decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there's no evidence of that. And so it's hard to see where this one goes from here.

Again, Klein is analyzing this in terms of ordinary political gamesmanship. But he has it backward. Suppose the IRS's abuses were not ordered or explicitly encouraged by the White House. That would mean, as Commentary's Jonathan Tobin puts it, that the agency "has so thoroughly absorbed the views of its political masters that it doesn't even recognize when it has crossed the line into illegal activity."

In other words, if this is the case, the left's hateful and slanderous campaign against its political foes, especially the Tea Party--the demagoguery of Obama, his fellow Democrats and their supporters in the media, led by the New York Times editorial page--was sufficient to prompt the IRS agents to cast aside their professional obligations and embark on a campaign of political abuse whose effect was to ease Obama's re-election.

In his testimony to the Senate Watergate Committee--whose hearings opened 40 years ago today--John Dean famously called that scandal "a cancer on the presidency." If Obama, his campaign or his White House aides are directly implicated in the IRS's abuses, this will be another cancer on the presidency, remediable by resignation or impeachment.

But if the IRS acted without direction from above--if it "went rogue" against the Constitution and in support of the party in power--then we are dealing with a cancer on the federal government. That, it seems to us, is a far direr diagnosis, one whose treatment is likely to be radical and risky