There are three scandals plaguing President Barack Obama, says The Economist. These are the administration’s handling of the terrorist attack on the US diplomatic outpost in Benghazi, the Justice Department snooping on journalists, and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) hounding conservatives. Libya was a “tragic failure, not a crime”. The snooping scandal is “murkier”. But the IRS scandal, in which tax officials “singled out the president’s opponents”, subjecting right-wing groups seeking tax-exempt status to “long delays and intimidating questionnaires”, is “unambiguously outrageous”.
The IRS affair is “almost too shocking to be credible”, agrees Janet Daley in The Daily Telegraph. “Scarcely anything could be more antithetical to the principles on which America was founded.” But the news was overtaken by “revelations about the administration’s infringements on the freedom of the press” that have left Obama’s allies on The New YorkTimes and Washington Post outraged. First, there was the seizure of phone records of the Associated Press on what turned out to be a false allegation that it was breaching national security. Then came news that Fox News reporter James Rosen had been investigated under the Espionage Act for soliciting classified information (“not illegal – or even particularly out of the ordinary”).
Yet Obama’s approval ratings haven’t dropped, says Brad Knickerbocker in the Christian Science Monitor. It’s “not that the public doesn’t care”, but it’s “not linking him personally to events”. Yet the scandals will have a “deadening effect on Obama’s second term”, says David Taylor in The Times. There have already been two resignations and the FBI has announced a criminal investigation. “If history records that Barack Obama was an inspirational figure who became an underachieving president, this will be the period when his soaring ambition was grounded.”