It will come as no surprise to anyone when I say that Washington is in full scandal mode these days.<\/p>\n
I attended a Washington dinner this past week \u2014 one of those fancy affairs in a fancy room with fancy speakers, fancy food, and funds raised. \u00a0There may be a dozen such events a night in this city.<\/p>\n
On one side of me sat a former aide to senior officials. \u00a0His first question after we shared our backgrounds was, so what do you think about AP, the IRS and Benghazi? \u00a0The query might as well have been, what did the president know and when did he know it? \u00a0That was Senator Howard Baker\u2019s question during the Watergate hearings and the essential Washington-in-scandal-mode inquiry every since.<\/p>\n
My answer \u2013 one you increasingly hear among Washington hands of all stripes \u2014 is that Mr. Obama probably didn\u2019t know about Eric Holder\u2019s spying on the Associate Press (a break-in without a break-in). \u00a0Nor about IRS targeting of conservatives \u2013 though senior White House aides, including David Axelrod, may be another matter. \u00a0And Benghazi revealed a White House totally bereft of contingency plans and a president frozen in place when faced with facts foreign to his preconceptions. \u00a0But in the pair of domestic scandals, even if the president didn\u2019t know the details, yes, he was, in a moral rather than legal way, responsible.<\/p>\n
What I meant by that \u2013 and I have also found universal agreement on this one among people who have worked Washington for a while \u2013 is that it is amazing how much the tone of any administration is set from the top. \u00a0These scandals echo Mr. Obama\u2019s tone.<\/p>\n
To see what I mean, consider this lesson of history. \u00a0Ronald Reagan is remembered for his geniality and his stories. \u00a0But what he conveyed through his personality and his manner was both humility and a bigger-than-the-moment perspective on the obsessions of the day. \u00a0He could lean back. \u00a0He could laugh. \u00a0And he could remind everyone that the Constitution, the nation and the American people were bigger and nobler that anyone here \u2013 and that we should rise to their standard.<\/p>\n
Over the last few weeks, we have seen a reflection of President Obama\u2019s very different attitudes in the Congressional testimony of former IRS chief Steven Miller, the public explanations of Attorney General Eric Holder and the White House pressroom fumblings of press secretary Jay Carney.<\/p>\n
For again and again these last five years, the president has conveyed distain for the other branches of government (dressing down the Supreme Court in a State of the Union address, for example) and for the Constitution (recession appointments when there was no recess or announcing that, if Congress won\u2019t act on some policy proposal, he would, a whiff of government by decree).<\/p>\n
So what happened when his IRS former commissioner was summoned to Capitol Hill? \u00a0He felt it was acceptable to convey contempt for his congressional questioners \u2013 as had Mr. Holder on previous occasions, and as has Mr. Carney toward the White House press corps in his incredible parallel universe answers to their questions about the scandals.<\/p>\n
Here is one last example of what I am talking about.<\/p>\n
It turned out that sitting on the other side of me at that recent dinner was a White House aide. Not someone anyone outside of this person\u2019s area of highly technical responsibility would know of. \u00a0I certainly didn\u2019t. \u00a0He was impressively intelligent, on top of his portfolio and socially very smooth. \u00a0But as he discussed administration policy in his field of expertise, that familiar attitude started coming through: We are doing all that can be done; now it is time for others to match our excellence\u2026 and we have redefined this field so all your old categories are irrelevant. \u00a0I could have been listening to the president talking about any of a number of issues.<\/p>\n
Among many other things, presidential leadership is about understanding the standards you are setting for your administration. \u00a0As I say, I do not believe that this president\u2019s culpability in the AP and IRS affairs is legal in nature. \u00a0It is not that he gave orders to do wrong, but that, from the day he entered office, he conveyed attitudes we are now seeing reflected in his team. \u00a0These attitudes led them \u2013 and him \u2013 to this moment. \u00a0That is the true presidential involvement in the scandals that so obsess Washington today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It will come as no surprise to anyone when I say that Washington is in full scandal mode these days. I attended a Washington dinner this past week \u2014 one of those fancy affairs in a fancy room with fancy speakers, fancy food, and funds raised. \u00a0There may be a dozen such events a night […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[158,147,157,156,60,155,43],"class_list":["post-1572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-general","tag-ap","tag-benghazi","tag-department-of-justice","tag-irs","tag-obama","tag-scandal","tag-tea-party"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1572"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1574,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1572\/revisions\/1574"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}