Two very different events last week offered clues to both America’s politics and its foreign policy over the next few months. One was an election and the other involved the formation of a committee by the US House of Representatives, but both are evidence of how the country’s politics continue to shift to the right, even with a Democrats in the White House.
In Washington, the House formally created a special committee to investigate the 2012 attack on the US diplomatic mission in Benghazi or, more accurately, the Barack Obama administration’s response to the attack. The fact that Benghazi has already been investigated at length by multiple committees in both the House and the Senate has become irrelevant, as has the fact that all of these enquiries have turned up nothing that remotely fits the definition of a “scandal”.
A year-and-a-half of relentless talk about Benghazi in America’s right-wing media has convinced many rank-and-file Republicans that a “scandal” does, indeed, exist and that in covering it up, senior Obama administration officials have committed crimes. Because the GOP base believes this so fervently, “Benghazi” has become a powerful tool for fundraising, getting out the Republican vote and launching pre-emptive political strikes against a Hillary Clinton for the 2016 presidential election campaign. As evidence of this look no further than this fact: Virtually every one of the 233 Republicans in the House applied for a seat on the Benghazi committee (in the end, seven were chosen). Democrats, allotted five seats, are, at this writing, still deciding whether to participate at all.
One can write a certain amount of this off to political gamesmanship, but as America has become ever-more politically polarised one of the striking changes has been the degree to which partisans of each side now often believe their own ideologically-charged nonsense.
This tendency passed some sort of milestone last week when Michelle Obama spoke out on behalf of the kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls and some conservatives took to both television and the internet to accuse her of embracing the cause as a way to divert attention from Benghazi. As I have said in this space before: Benghazi is definitely a failure of security and obviously merits a serious ‘lessons-learned’ assessment, but turning it into a political witch hunt is not going to solve either of those problems. What it most definitely is not is an impeachable offense for Obama, yet some Republicans are already talking about it in those terms.
If the GOP bolsters its House majority and takes control of the Senate in November there is a distinct possibility that House Republicans will plunge ahead with their second unwise, politically-impossible impeachment in a generation (politically impossible because while impeaching a president in the House requires only a simple majority, convicting him in the Senate requires a two-thirds vote, meaning that even in a GOP-controlled Senate, a dozen or more Democrats would have to turn on Obama to remove him from office).
The other big political event of last week was a Senate primary in North Carolina that served as a reminder of why debates like Benghazi are even taking place. The primary saw Thom Tillis, the speaker of North Carolina’s state house of Representatives, beat out seven other Republicans to earn the right to run against the state’s Democratic senator, Kay Hagen, this November. Hagen is widely viewed as one of the senate’s most vulnerable Democrats in this year’s midterm elections.
The question prior to the vote was whether North Carolina Republicans could avoid falling into the trap that cost their party control of the Senate in both 2010 and 2012. In both of those years a clutch of Democrats who most observers thought were doomed managed to win elections because Republicans nominated unelectable cranks to run against them. Tillis, the choice of the party establishment not only beat several Tea Party opponents, but did so by a sufficient margin to avoid a potentially damaging run-off election.
Yet, the fact that Tillis is considered a mainstream, ‘establishment’, Republican is, itself, indicative of how much the party has changed. In the state legislature, he has led efforts to cut funds for education, health care and unemployment insurance. He also followed the national Republican trend of pushing through a law narrowing the kinds of identification people can use to vote and scaling back measures such as early and absentee voting that, historically, tend to favour Democrats. Very little of this would have been considered ‘mainstream’ 20, or even ten, years ago. What it means for Obama is a rough ride for the remaining two-and-a-half years of his presidency. However little there may actually be to the Benghazi ‘scandal’, it is clear that the GOP has no intention of letting go of it any time between now and November 2016. Meanwhile, the success of candidates like Tillis shows that one can govern with a Tea Party agenda, provided one avoids that movement’s worst rhetorical excesses.
That means more partisan warfare, a continued insistence that political compromise somehow equals moral failure, and a dispiriting few years ahead for pretty much everyone who lives outside of Washington.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches Political Science at the University of Vermont.
