I don’t know if Alexander Burns and John Harris of Politico are so much commenting on a new narrative as they are trying to construct one. Perhaps they are trying to write the definitive version.
The narrative is personal. The uproars over alleged politicization of the IRS and far-reaching attempts to monitor journalists and their sources have not been linked directly to Obama. But it does not strain credulity to suggest that Obama’s well-known intolerance for leaks, and his regular condemnations of conservative dark-money groups, could have filtered down to subordinates.
The narrative is ideological. For five years, this president has been making the case that a growing and activist government has good intentions and can carry these intentions out with competence. Conservatives have warned that government is dangerous, and even good intentions get bungled in the execution. In different ways, the IRS uproar, the Justice Department leak investigations, the Benghazi tragedy and the misleading attempts to explain it, and the growing problems with implementation of health care reform all bolster the conservative worldview…
…In Obama’s case, the narrative emerging from this tumultuous week goes something like this: None of these messes would have happened under a president less obsessed with politics, less insulated within his own White House and less trusting of government as an institution.
I don’t know whose narrative this is supposed to belong to. I don’t think the Republicans are going to argue that the problem is that Obama is too trusting in government as an institution. They are going to argue that he’s a fascist dictator who sics the IRS on his political opponents and tramples on the 1st Amendment and the 2nd Amendment, and the 10th, and any other amendments they can think of. And rather than offer a little balance to that unhinged talk, organizations like Politico will write that the president handed them the ammo even though he wasn’t directly responsible for any of it.
How’d he hand them the ammo? He criticized the Citizens United ruling and all the dark money in politics. He didn’t invite enough Washingtonians to dinner. He trusted that the government could do things like expand access to health care and remove some injustices from the system. He agreed with the Republicans that national security leaks should be aggressively investigated.
As a political writer, I was about ready to hang myself if I had to write one more article about sequestration and the budget. So, I get it. Now we all have something to write about again. I don’t think the general public really understands how important it is that writing be fun. They know that writers are after page-views, but trust me when I say that writing for page-views isn’t fun. What’s fun is writing about stuff that you can get energized about, and that has a lot of carry-over to what people want to read. The damage being done by the sequester is the most important domestic story in the country right now, along with the cause of the sequester, which is the total radicalization of the Republican Party. But writing about the closing of health clinics and day care centers and access to cancer treatment and closed airports cannot compare to writing about a BIG SCANDAL.
Also, much like Congress was fine with sequestration until it threatened to delay their flights home, the press has been largely complacent about the growing surveillance powers of the state until it wound up impacting them directly. Now they have a bee in their bonnet.
So, this is how it is going to be now. We’re going to have a brawl about competing narratives, where an unhinged lunatic party accuses the Democrats of fascist socialism and the Democrats try to prevent the defenestration of the federal government.
At least I can have some fun with this.
