Oklahoma

This morning, Mike and Mike talked sports on ESPN Radio.  That’s usually no surprise.  But they weren’t talking sports on the morning of April 16, choosing instead to talk about the Boston Marathon bombing.  While that was marginally a sports story, that’s not the type of coverage they lent to the subject.

This morning, the news in DC tells us to expect up to 91 fatalities in Oklahoma after yesterday’s tornadoes, and half of those may be children.   And then it moves on to the next story, about the IRS or the Department of Justice or whichever scandal is having its turn.

This isn’t meant to compare events, or claim East Coast bias, or anything like that.  Realities like the tornadoes in Oklahoma are difficult for our head to process and almost impossible for our hearts to handle.  Events like the Boston bombing – and like September 11, or the shooting sprees in Newtown, Blacksburg, and Aurora – are, in a way, easier to deal with.  In those situations, there is a defined bad guy – a terrorist or a lunatic – so the pain can be focused as outrage and anger.  On one side is our concept of normalcy, on the other side are motives driven by evil.  Very simple.

But what motive does a tornado have?  Or a hurricane?  Or a meteor the size of Texas?

Ours is a dangerous world – a fact which makes our lives, and those around us, very fragile.

 

A Great Week for Team Obama?

Megan McArdle might be onto something:

In finance, there’s an art known as “Big Bath Accounting” which is used to manage earnings expectations.  Here’s how it works:  if you know you’re going to have a bad quarter, you look around for anything else that might go wrong in the future, and you decide to “recognize” that bad news now.  Inventory looking a little stale?  Write it down, man!  Customers getting a little slow to pay?  Now would be a good time to write off their accounts as bad debt… The theory is that there is only so much bad news people can take in all at once, so you might as well cram all the bad stuff into one action-packed earnings call.

This is a couple days old, but the more you think about it – and the more news cycles turn since ScandalFest 2013 dropped – the more sense it makes that having all this hit at once is a good thing for the White House.

None of the controversies has been what any serious commentator would call impeachable, but each serves to damage credibility.  Imagine if they were spaced out a little more.  If the IRS scandal broke after two weeks of talking about the Benghazi hearings, and was subsequently followed by the AP/DOJ dust-up breaking a week or two after that, it would be far worse for all the President’s men.  Each scandal would be discussed in its own spotlight for a little while, but the timing would still maintain that “Groundhog Day” feeling.

In order for the current blitzkrieg to be as damaging, new information will have to come out fairly regularly over the course of several months.  That’s a lot of new stuff that would have to break, like the President said, there may not be that much “there” there.  Meanwhile, a public with a short attention span and a media looking for fresh news will find new stuff to talk about.  Democrats who are looking for fundraising and grassroots support in the mid-term elections will be slow to criticize the President.

On top of that, scandal discussion sucks up a lot of oxygen that could be used on other issues.  Higher taxes are shrinking paychecks, and Obamacare is making American health care more expensive and complex.  The policy environment is ripe for Republican criticism, but the line that connects a big government that taxes too much and overreaches on programs with a big government that swipes reporters’ phone records and harasses its opponents is not starkly obvious to casual observers.  And there’s always the chance for a Republican politician trying to overplay his or her party’s hand.

The last couple of weeks may have been tough to get through.  There’s still plenty of time for the scandals to fade into the background and there will be opportunities for the President to go back on offense.  If all this bad news was going to hit anyway, having it hit at once was the best possible outcome for the White House.

Sometimes a crummy week makes for a better year.

Scandals! The Bad News Power Rankings

Jay Carney faced the press today, and… Yikes!  That was rough!

On some level, you have to respect Carney.  He could have woken up, faxed in a resignation Pat Riley style, rented an office near Farragut Square and started counting money.   Instead, he chose to answer questions in the face of Scandalpalooza.  And even if he had a rough day, none of the scandals are impeachable.

They are damaging, though.  In fact, the last week and a half has heaped layer after layer of bad news on the White House doorstep.  The mid-term elections are now 18 months away, and the window for putting up any meaningful legislative wins is maybe 10-12 months.  President will have a tougher time advancing his agenda while responding to all the bad news.  Ranked below are the President’s top speed bumps (that we know about so far today), with 1 being the most disruptive to the President’s agenda and 5 the least:

  1. DOJ vs. AP  - People appreciate unfairness, so the IRS scandal will have legs.  But no reporter will have any trouble understanding the First Amendment threats posed by the Justice Department skimming reporters’ phone records.
  2. IRS vs. Tea Party Groups – Political players wielding government power against their enemies is easy to understand, and makes for a simple story to write.
  3. Benghazi – Really, what’s the worst part?  The administration’s keystone response to the embassy attack?  The lies about what caused the attack?  The fact that it looks like the President and his underlings were less than forthcoming due to the impending election?  This is pretty complex – for scandals looking to catch on, complex is bad.
  4. Gosnell - During the election cycle, progressive groups tried (largely successfully) to reframe the abortion debate by talking about narrow hypotheticals.  From the White House’s perspective, the silver lining of the week’s tri-scandals is that it takes mainstream attention away from the Gosnell verdict.  It will help motivate pro-life advocates, but its broader messaging implications will be muted.
  5. Obamacare - Small business owners are already feeling the pinch.  Kathleen Sebelius has been doing her “Secretary BoJangles” routine trying to fund advertising and encourage signups (like it’s some kind of high school club).

(If I missed anything, or if you disagree, leave a comment or yell at me on Twitter.)

Obama’s Commencement Speech Revisited

Last Sunday, President Obama addressed Ohio State’s Class of 2013 thusly:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems. Some of these same voices also do their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices.

Cool speech, wasn’t it?  Here’s a quick rundown of some of the big headlines over the last week:

  1. The Administration messed up in Benghazi – and ABC news showed they directly lied to the American people about the root cause of the attack.
  2. The IRS specifically and deliberately targeted the President’s political foes during the 2012 election cycle.
  3. The Obama Justice Department snagged phone records – both professional and personal – for AP reporters.  They didn’t say why.

 

Gosnell, perception, and reality

Before today’s Gosnell verdict, Gallup demonstrated that Americans’ views on abortion were holding steady.  Incidentally, “holding steady” means that most Americans believe that abortion is, at least in some cases, wrong.

To hear the election rhetoric last November, you wouldn’t think 72% of Americans feel like abortion should be completely illegal or legal “only in some circumstances.”   Remember the Republican “War on Women“?  Recall the successful efforts to link Mitt Romney to Richard Mourdock and Todd Akin?

In reality, most Americans – regardless of where they would fall on the issue of abortion – probably think that Kermit Gosnell is a monster and a murderer.  His conviction is no reason to crow victoriously.  Gallup’s numbers suggest that there is support for the pro-life side; last November suggests that support is generally silent.

People are pro-life, but they don’t identify with the pro-life movement.  For a movement that has gained enormous traction over the past four decades, conquering this hurdle is the next obvious step.

Benghazi and Cultural Stickyness

Today the Washington Post pointed out analytics that showed interest in the Benghazi hearings was largely older, whiter men.  That may have a bit to do with the demographics of people working inside the Beltway who would be most likely to tune in, but it won’t be the final determination of whether this scandal has legs.

One of the reasons Watergate remains so ubiquitous in American political is that its unique moniker has kept it alive.  When political scandals erupt, the suffix “-gate” is immediately added.  No one references the Teapot Dome scandal that way.

Linguistically, the Benghazi scandal has that potential.  Too many lavish, taxpayer-financed vacations for the President?  Travelghazi.  Donors receiving special access to the President in exchange for campaign cash?  Sounds like a “Donorghazi” program.  And you can throw in Cubaghazi for that one couple that raised a bunch of money for the President and then magically got to go to a country that normal schlubs aren’t allowed to go to.)

It won’t be testimony in a stuffy hearing room that gives the administration’s misdirection gravity beyond the  halls of Congress.

A Matter of Trust

The catchy headline is that more people trust a guy who talked to an empty chair than the President of the United States, but that’s the Reader’s Digest account of the Reader’s Digest poll on the celebrities we trust the most.

Consider the top five: Tom Hanks, Sandra Bullock, Denzel Washington, Meryl Streep, and Maya Angelou.  This poll is probably fun to report on, but did the respondents really give it that much thought?

If Hanks knocks on your door at 11:00 p.m. dressed in drag and imploring you to help him move Peter Scoleri’s lifeless corpse,  that trust would likely wear off pretty quick.

Calling these people trustworthy is a version of the word association game.  It’s a knee-jerk reaction, and not necessarily rational.  It’s fleeting, but it helps contextualize what we read or ear about them – even the bad stuff – so long as we are distant from it.

On the other hand, 45% seems low for a sitting President, and it seems like a number that could get beaten down – maybe with a steady drumbeat of stories about Benghazi.  Not a deluge of Republican arm-waving and histrionics, but a steady drip of stories about inconsistencies in testimony or incompetencies in strategy will keep the idea alive that the President is not 100% forthcoming.  The reverberations could extend into his legislative agenda and clip his wings as he tries to foist Speaker Pelosi back onto the country.

Benghazi probably won’t drive him from office, but as long as the story has legs it will whittle away the President’s shrinking cache of trust.