Just Like a Flower in ... Benghazi, the I.R.S., the A.P., and Obama’s Nixonian Umbrella

"In his little shoezies so neat, with his little green umbrella, such a happy fella, he just smiles and lies, What a beautiful day... " m/r

Benghazi, the I.R.S., the A.P., and Obama’s Nixonian Umbrella : The New Yorker
BY AMY DAVIDSON MAY 16, 2013

“How do you feel about comparisons by some of your critics of this week’s scandals to those that happened under the Nixon Administration?” Jeff Mason, of Reuters, asked President Obama, as he stood in a rainy Rose Garden on Thursday with Turkey’s Prime Minister Erdogan. Given all the political theatre this week, is it wrong to wish that Obama had fully committed himself, hunched over, balled up his fists, and answered, “People have gotta know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I’m not a crook,” then waited to see if the reporters froze or laughed? Instead, having called for umbrellas with un-Nixonian ease—”why don’t we get a couple of Marines, they’re going to look good next to us”—Obama told Mason, “You can go ahead and read the history and draw your own conclusions.”

A true Nixon-style gesture might at least have been a clear dose of farce, after a week in which politics and the ridiculous have been all mixed up. Perhaps it was the way the rain and the languages stopped and started—half of the questions came from Turkish journalists, and were translated—but we have reached the point in the week where the triple-scandal convergence felt more like mud than a maelstrom. At times, Obama’s answers about one slipped to another. The approach he has settled upon seems to be to present himself as a repairman: “My concern is that if there is a problem in government we fix it.” Benghazi? More embassy security. I.R.S.? He wouldn’t want them coming after him, either. Seizing A.P. phone records? Maybe a press shield law. But here one saw him least detached, which is also why this might be the one scandal of the three that really lasts.

“Leaks related to national security can put people at risk. They can put men and women in uniform whom I’ve sent into the battlefield at risk. They can put some of our intelligence officers… at risk,” Obama said. “U.S. national security is dependent on those folks being able to operate with confidence that folks back home have their backs. So they’re not just left high and dry.” Although he then referred to balancing all that with a “democratic” process that held him “accountable,” it may be that the central problem for Obama, when it comes to questions of secrecy, is not realizing that it is sometimes the press that has the backs, as he likes to put it, of our soldiers, especially when they are sent places they shouldn’t be, for reasons that make no sense. They might also have the backs of civilians in other countries. (It would have been interesting to follow up the question to Obama about the A.P. with one to Erdogan about press freedom in Turkey.) This may not be the most Nixonian of the scandals, but the most Obamian one.

And Benghazi—given what we’ve learned, in the e-mails and documents that the White House released yesterday, about the State Department’s involvement in editing talking points—may turn out to be the most Clintonian. ...

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