Scandal, Scandal, Who's Got The Scandal?
Dean
The Wall Street Journal's Brendan Miniter notes that most two-term Presidents have boring and uninspiring second terms, and that every one since Nixon has wound up spending much of his second term fighting of scandal charges. He also has basic advice for the President on that score:
Lackluster second terms pre-date Nixon, of course. George Washington's first term was pivotal, but his second is most remembered only for his farewell address. James Madison's second term saw the British burn the White House. But what changed with Nixon's resignation is that journalists realized they could bring down a sitting president. It doesn't matter now whether the corruption (and any bureaucracy as large as the federal government contains corruption) actually leads to the Oval Office. The knives are out and, electoral mandates notwithstanding, presidents are most vulnerable after they have a first term record to pick through.
But no president is doomed to this fate. Republicans are of course deluding themselves if they think the media hounds aren't out there sniffing for a scandal to howl about. And there are plenty of "scandals" to be found. Abu Ghraib became an issue because many journalists thought, ah ha!, evidence was finally found that proved this White House was ready and willing to throw civil liberties to the wind. Every "torture memo" revelation since the war on terror began has only confirmed the suspicion that the next Watergate story is out there and that it is somehow connected to the shadowy war against al Qaeda. In a perfect world, we'd now be talking about openness and transparency as a way of beating the curse. Yet for Mr. Bush, no matter how open he is, if the future is about tweaking the policies he already has in place to fight the war on terror, the media will eventually find a scandal that resonates.
To beat the media gotcha game, the president might want to consider a little advice sometimes given to new elementary school teachers: Keep them busy or they will keep you busy. Mr. Bush might succeed with his interesting and ambitious second-term agenda precisely because he has an interesting and ambitious agenda. Just keeping up with what is new in government will be work enough. In the coming years we may find that mini-scandals never become big scandals because the public is clamoring to know what is happening with substantive policy changes that will affect their everyday lives.
We should also note that the first term was plagued by mini-scandals that the press depserately tried to turn into monsters, but turned out to mostly be a bunch of hyped and partisan nonsense.
Still, the point seems clear. Most Presidents seem to tread water after re-election. This one obviously has a highly aggressive agenda. It should be interesting to watch. But I'm betting Miniter is right. The Iran-Contra "scandal" looks pretty dumb in retrospect: an effort to defy Congress, free some hostages in Iran, and defeat a murderous communist dictator in Nicaragua was hardly the worst thing a President could possibly do, and most people knew perfectly well that it was well-intentioned and not "corrupt." In retrospect, while most people found Clinton's behavior odious, most people forgave him and at least admitted that the independent prosecutors had been overzealous in both Reagan and Clinton's cases.
That's the other thing in this President's favor by the way: no unelected, unaccountable Special Prosecutors running around like loose cannons chasing after any whiff of scandal. The Congress finally got rid of independent prosecutors. All to the good in my view; the country would have been better of if we'd never had them, and will be better off not having them in the future.
They've tried to make everything into a Bush scandal so their credibility is gone.
Bush could probably be caught with a dead boy in his bed and nobody would believe it.
After 'Fake but Accurate' there's really no place left to go.
It used to be that you'd assume what was in the press was true until you had very good reason to belive otherwise. For me, and I think for many other folks, 2004 has turned that on its head. I now assume whatever I hear in the MSM about anything is a lie, or at best a half-truth, until I have a good reason to believe otherwise. This goes triple for anything negative said about the environment, the USA, Christians, Republicans, or President Bush.
I don't say that because I'm some sort of partisan zealot. I voted Dem or independent most of my life, and I'm not a Christian. It's just my observation and experience. I suspect I'm not alone.
Very good analyses. I will only say this for now: Watergate showed that the mass media can bring down a President. "Rathergate" showed that somebody else, e.g., a blogger, can bring down the mass media.
I must mention also that it was under Nixon and Agnew that the Left-Wing bias of the media first began to be a major issue. E.g., a book was written at the time, "The Left-Leaning Antenna". (The _style_ of that!) It has just now occured to me that the Watergate imbroglio was the media's way of derailing such criticism. But it's coming back, in force. And the more the media try to cook up another Watergate, the more their bias is revealed. Trying to undermine the President during a War for our survival throws their patriotism into question as well.
Maor: Moderately supportive, yeah... but then again, there's a small but loud number of Senators who are out to 'prove' that they 'don't take orders from the White House' (paraphrases, both), at least if their attitudes remain similar to the ones I saw in 2001-2002.