Tim Stanley

Dr Tim Stanley is a historian of the United States. His biography of Pat Buchanan is out now. His personal website is www.timothystanley.co.uk and you can follow him on Twitter @timothy_stanley.

Barack Obama: even the mainstream media has given up on the hopey-changey stuff

By Tim Stanley US politics Last updated: May 30th, 2013

There was a time when Obama couldn’t get a bad headline in this town. Now he’s the new Nixon. I dropped out of writing about US politics three weeks ago to finish a book and, on my return, I discover that everything’s changed. The President has been hit not by one Watergate but by three – Benghazi, the IRS, the DOJ phone records scandal – and even the mainstream media has stopped treating him like the bringer of hope and change predicted in the Bible. He's not a Messiah, he's a very naughty boy.

It’s important to remember that Obama’s second term blues began long before the scandals broke. Although he won the 2012 election, the Democrats failed to take the House, and the Senate remained vulnerable to filibuster. That might not have been such a roadblock to legislation had the Prez not spent the election trashing his opponents, calling the Republicans everything from heartless SOBs to enablers of rape. The result was that he entered his second term despised by much of the Congress and so unable to get much done. Yes, he hardballed the GOP into accepting nominal tax increases but he failed even to pass even the slenderest of gun control bills. His political capital was exhausted within weeks.

That left Obama with an aura of lonely moral authority. The media could’ve continued to love him for that alone, imagining him to be the last line of defence against the Neanderthal conservatism of the Tea Party. But the scandals have undone that moral superiority. Everybodywas outraged by the IRS and phone records stories,including the Washington Post, the New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, NBS and CBS. A lot of the anger came from the fact that their industry had been targeted (the head of the Associated Press wrote Eric Holder, “We regard this action by the Department of Justice as a serious interference with AP's constitutional rights to gather and report the news.” Even dear old Helen Thomas compared Obama to Nixon). Josh Meyer, a former national security writer for the Los Angeles Times, opined, “There's a red line that no other administration has crossed before that the Obama administration has blown right past.” It is true that none of the shenanigans have been linked directly to the Oval Office. But while we’ve yet to find the smoking email, there’s a growing consensus that Obama set the tone of his administration by the trademark brutality by which he fought his opponents. Journalists suddenly know what it must have felt like to be a conservative activist for the past four years, to be treated with a mix of contempt and ruthless discrimination. Obama’s administration has been the most hostile towards investigative journalism in history: its DOJ has filed more leak-related investigations than all the other administrations combined.

So, Obama has evolved in the eyes of press and public from the brave man who stands above the crowd to someone who exists in self-imposed isolation – very Nixonlike in his obsession with opponents and his total removal from the lives of ordinary Americans. When Nixon was stuck in Watergate he used to escape to friendly territory to meet with his few remaining admirers and console himself with their loyalty. On Wednesday the President of the United States took time off work to visit two Chicago Democratic fundraisers – the cost of flying aboard Air Force One to his home town was an astonishing $180,000 an hour. He met with 70 friends at the home of longtime supporters Bettylu and Paul Saltzman, the kind of fans prepared to spend $32,400 per head to have dinner with the Prez. He “obviously likes giving speeches more than he does running the executive branch,” observed Chris Matthews, a disenchanted liberal journalist who once said that those speeches sent “a thrill” up his leg.

What the mainstream media has yet to do is to connect the authoritarianism of the administration’s personnel with the authoritarianism of its policies. The two are inseparable. An administration that spies on opponents is also an administration that tries to socialise healthcare, kill US citizens with drone strikes, force churches to compromise their moral consciences, make it harder to purchase firearms and run up unimaginable levels of debt. Obama is the latest in a long line of wannabe emperors to inhabit the Oval Office, and if his presidency resembles Nixon’s then it’s because both share the view that the complexities and dangers of modern life require the executive branch and the federal government to assume levels of authority not implied by the Constitution. The only antidote to this imperialist trend is a president who willingly gives up his power – and you’d struggle to find any politician in either party who would be happy to do that.

Those of us who inhabit the Right are left with some small satisfaction that we saw all this coming and were crying “crook” long before the mainstream media did. But the tragedy is that the undressing of the emperor didn’t occur before the election, which means we are stuck with him for another four years. Perhaps that's a tragedy for Obama, too. So consumed by fury and conspiracy has his administration become that he seems sadly isolated. If Obama's going to go the full Nixon route, it would probably be quicker for him to write a friends list than an enemies one.

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