Public Opinion and Scandalabra

A previous post examined public reaction to Scandalabra. ABC reports:

Americans in a new ABC News/Washington Post poll sharply reject special scrutiny of conservative groups by the Internal Revenue Service, suspect an administration cover-up of the Benghazi incident and express substantial distrust of the federal government more generally.

Yet the national survey also finds no backlash against Barack Obama, at least at this point. His job approval rating is stable, albeit at a tepid 51 percent; he’s aided by accelerating economic optimism as well as by comparison with the much less-popular Republicans in Congress.

See PDF with full results and charts here.

Longer-term impacts of contentious current issues remain to be seen, but there’s potential for significant damage to the administration. Americans by a vast 74-20 percent see the IRS’ behavior as inappropriate, with most feeling that way strongly – and 56 percent see it as a deliberate attempt to harass conservative organizations, not a mere administrative error.

The public divides on whether or not the administration is honestly disclosing what it knows about the IRS’ actions; 45 percent suspect a cover-up, 42 percent instead see full transparency. And more than a third overall in this poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, think these actions not only are inappropriate, but illegal.

Further, on the attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, last fall, suspicions of a cover-up rise to a majority, 55 percent. And in this case only a third of Americans are persuaded that the Obama administration is disclosing honestly what it knows about what occurred.

Pew reports:

So far, public interest in a trio of controversies connected to the Obama administration has been limited. Roughly a quarter (26%) of Americans say they are very closely following reports that the IRS targeted conservative groups. About the same number (25%) are tracking the Benghazi investigation very closely, and even fewer (16%) are very closely following news about the Justice Department subpoenaing phone records of AP journalists.

The new survey by the Pew Research Center, conducted May 16-19 among 1,002 adults, finds that 37% of Republicans are paying very close attention to the IRS story, compared with 21% of Democrats and 25% of independents. And the Benghazi investigation continues to draw much greater interest from Republicans (34% very closely) than Democrats (18%).

A historical review of previous controversies involving White House or cabinet officials finds that these levels of public interest – and the partisan divide in attentiveness – are not necessarily new. Previous scandals – such as the Lewis “Scooter” Libby case during George W. Bush’s administration or the “Pardon-gate” scandal at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term – received similar levels of public attention, and were generally more interesting to those in the opposition party.

Deniability

At National Journal, Josh Kraushaar writes:

The Wall Street Journal reported today that White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler was aware of the IRS wrongdoing on the week of April 22—nearly three weeks before the agency acknowledged its mistakes. It's hard to believe Obama's chief counsel was aware of what happened without informing at least the president's senior staff. Adding to the confusion, the White House hasn't allowed Ruemmler to be interviewed to add clarity to the timeline.

At last Thursday's press conference, Obama chose his words about the IRS scandal very carefully. "I can assure you that I certainly did not know anything about the IG report before the IG report had been leaked through the press." Even though he was asked about the overall malfeasance, he specifically said he didn't know about the report. That parsing alone raises questions about the level of candor coming from the White House.

Politico reports on an admission by Jay Carney:

Ruemmler did inform White House chief of staff Denis McDonough's office of the investigation, Carney said, and other senior staff were also told of the report. Carney wouldn't say who those other staffers were, but did say there were communications between White House staff and Treasury Department staff ahead of the first news reports of the IRS investigation, which emerged 10 days ago.

Though senior staff knew of the probe, Carney said Ruemmler concluded that the investigation was "not a matter she should convey to the president" until the report was finalized.

Obama, Nixon, and the Press

At RealClearPolitics, Carl Cannon likens President Obama's press relations to President Nixon's:

Richard Milhous Nixon was thin-skinned, felt persecuted by the opposition party, had a penchant for classifying political adversaries -- and journalists -- as “enemies,” and tried to control his image so fiercely that, ultimately, zealous aides committed illegal acts to further his re-election.

But even before that had happened -- and before Nixon himself began directing a coverup -- truth had become a casualty of his administration. This is the parallel between Richard Nixon and Barack Obama.

No evidence has been unearthed connecting Obama, or anyone under his direction, to illicit activities. But the absence of criminality isn’t the only test here. Nixon’s “enemies,” at least in his mind, also included vast swaths of the Fourth Estate. That apparently is how the current president operates, too.

Barack Obama often displays contempt for the proper role of news-gatherers and, by extension, for the value of reporting that seeks to be unbiased. Often, officials in his White House or re-election campaign seem uncomprehending of the concept of straight reporting.
In their Manichean world, there are liberal news organizations (good) and conservative outlets (bad). Some of the news business does work this way -- more than when Nixon was president, for sure -- but what Obama and his political advisers and White House press handlers have done is graft their own hyper-partisanship onto the media.

In the Obama administration, it’s not uncommon for a White House press official to scream profanely over the phone at journalists whose stories they dislike, plant questions from friendly media outlets, and deny access to briefings to reporters who ask tough questions. This administration has aggressively used the Justice Department to ferret out news leaks, declared open season on a media organization out of sync with his philosophy (Fox News), and routinely questioned the professionalism of reporters and the patriotism of the opposition political party. That disquieting sound you hear is an echo from the Nixon years.

The California Legislature and Congressional Recruitment

When it comes to recruiting quality House candidates, the Democratic supermajority in the California Legislature may actually hinder Democrats and help Republicans.  Mark Z. Barabak and Richard Simon explain in The Los Angeles Times:

After years of budget misery, public opprobrium and term-limit-induced turnover, Sacramento is starting to look a lot more attractive to Democratic lawmakers and candidates, who once might have viewed a seat in Congress as the higher, more desirable rung on the political ladder. (A voter-passed change in term limits, allowing legislators to serve 12 years in a single chamber, is another reason staying put has grown more appealing.)

"If you want to be on MSNBC … or quoted in Roll Call" — the Capitol Hill newspaper — then Congress is "a good place to be," said state Sen. Kevin de Leon, a Democrat from Los Angeles who is favored to become the Senate's next leader. The Legislature is far better, he said, "if you want to get real, tangible things done."

He cites legislation creating the first state-run individual retirement program, which has brought De Leon national attention. Over the years, many other laws passed in Sacramento — on issues including family leave, clean air and consumer protection — have served as a model for Washington.

No congressional seat sits empty in California for want of interested candidates, Democrat or Republican. But with recruiting for the midterm elections underway and those races slowly taking shape, there has been no rush for the exits among Sacramento Democrats, even as more competitive primaries and a redrawing of political boundaries have loosened the hammerlock incumbents once held over their congressional seats.

...

(For Republicans, the political dynamic is precisely the opposite. Democratic domination in Sacramento threatens to marginalize any Republican elected to the Senate or Assembly, while the GOP majority in the House of Representatives is an attraction. "You go to Congress and you're part of a majority that's likely to exist through the decade," said Rob Stutzman, a veteran GOP strategist, who lamented the difficulty of attracting top-flight legislative candidates.

A Rationalization Falls Apart

IRS official Lois Lerner and others have claimed that the agency's scrutiny of conservative groups resulted from a flood of applications for tax-exempt status. But as Garance Franke-Ruta reports at The Atlantic, there was no flood at the time:

"[W]e saw a big increase in these kind of applications, many of which indicated that they were going to be involved in advocacy work," Lerner said.

But Todd Young, a Republican congressman from Indiana, pointed out at Friday's House Ways and Means Committee hearing with former acting IRS commissioner Steve Miller and Treasury Inspector General J. Russell George that this was not the case, according to the very data the IRS provided to the Treasury IG's office.

There were, he noted, actually fewer applications for tax-exempt status by groups seeking to be recognized as social-welfare organizations that year than the previous one, according to this IRS data. The real surge in applications did not come until 2012 -- the year the IRS stopped the practice of treating the Tea Party class of groups differently from others.

The Political Impact of Scandalabra

Gallup reports:

Slim majorities of Americans are very or somewhat closely following the situations involving the Internal Revenue Service (54%) and the congressional hearings on the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, and its aftermath (53%) -- comparatively low based on historical measures of other news stories over the last two decades.

A few days earlier, Pew reported:

 The public paid limited attention to last week’s congressional hearings on Benghazi. Fewer than half (44%) of Americans say they are following the hearings very or fairly closely, virtually unchanged from late January when Hillary Clinton testified. Last October, 61% said they were following the early stages of the investigation at least fairly closely.

It's likely that even smaller percentages would care about the Justice Department's seizure of AP phone records.  So is Scandalabra a political non-starter?  Hardly.

First, the AP story has alienated journalists, which means that the administration is in for tougher press scrutiny across the board.  One negative storyline might not make a dent in public opinion, but a barrage of them might.

Second, the scandals have jazzed up the GOP base.  Alex Roarty writes at National Journal:

Republicans also hope to use the controversies to stoke the embers of a conservative movement that seemed to be only flickering. That seems a fait accompli: The NRCC’s website saw its highest-ever day of traffic when the IRS revelations came to light, and committee officials say in the handful of days since, they reached a quarter of their total online fundraising goal for the entire year. “At a minimum, all of these story lines embolden the Republicans’ grassroots,” said Brian Walsh, a consultant who worked at the National Republican Senatorial Committee the past two cycles. “Which is what you saw at the start of the 2010 cycle; it’s reigniting the fervor at the grassroots level.

Third, the IRS story will probably abort any agency plans to go after Crossroads GPS and other such groups.

Fourth, the IRS story also complicates the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, since IRS bears a heavy responsibility for administering key portions of the law.  And the IRS handed a huge weapon to Obamacare critics, as CBS reports:

The IRS official in charge of the division responsible for discriminating against conservative organizations was promoted to head the IRS' Affordable Care Act office because she is a "superb civil servant," acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller told Congress on Friday.

While testifying before the House Ways and Means Committee about the undue scrutiny the IRS put on conservative nonprofits applying for tax-exempt status, Miller confirmed that Sarah Hall Ingram, who served as commissioner of the office responsible for the discrimination, was promoted. He acknowledged that her office provided "horrible customer service," even though he promoted her.

Fifth, crowdsourcing will come into play. Until now, individuals and groups may have been hesitant to disclose that they have been the subject of IRS audits.  Now they are coming forth and suggesting that the agency had political motives.  There will be many such stories in the months ahead.

Obama Tries to Make Nice with the Media

The Hill reports:

The White House took a series of steps Wednesday to make up with the Washington press corps.

The wooing took several shapes and followed a disastrous press briefing on Tuesday at which White House press secretary Jay Carney was torn apart over the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press phone records.

To bolster President Obama’s free-press credentials, the White House announced Wednesday it had asked Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) to reintroduce a press shield law that would allow media organizations to challenge subpoenas of phone records and offer legal protections for protecting confidential sources.

The White House also took the step of handing out records of emails related to the terrorist attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, which is designed to push back at suggestions it has not been transparent and bolster its case it has been truthful about the attack.