Paul Krugman on the Obama "scandals":
When Barack Obama was elected, I was sure
that it would be the Clinton years all over — that he would be subjected
to an endless series of claims of “scandal”, creating the sense of a
tainted administration even though all the alleged scandals would turn
out to be either trivial or nonexistent. Remember, after all those years
of front-page headlines and $70 million in public funds, the Whitewater
investigation came up dry.
In fact, however, none of that
happened during Obama’s first term. But would the second term be
different? For a little while it looked as if the old scandal machinery
was finally springing back to life, with Benghazi, the IRS, and more.
You could almost hear the sigh of contentment from a certain part of the
press corps.
But now it
has all evaporated.
Benghazi never made sense; it turns out that the IRS was targeting
conservative as well as liberal groups. And as Chait says in the linked
article, the NSA stuff is a policy dispute, not the kind of scandal the
right wing wants.
Of course, the absence of any fire behind the
smoke didn’t stop the Clinton witch hunts. But this time seems to be
different. Maybe the news media have actually learned something; maybe
they’re effectively disciplined, this time around, by the blogosphere.
Anyway, the narrative of a scandal-ridden presidency seems to be
evaporating as we speak.
So I was wrong. And I’m glad I was.
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