How much trouble is Obama really in?

Let us begin by acknowledging that US President Barack Obama has had a couple of bad weeks. The public relations messes (Republicans prefer to say “scandals”) swirling around the White House are undermining him politically.

Let us also keep things in perspective. Obama’s presidency is far from over. The president himself is far from powerless. He is not about to be impeached. Breathless comparisons to Richard Nixon mostly betray an ignorance of American history.

This is not to say that things are good. A new, more substantive, PR disaster can turn manageable problems into a genuine crisis. Even if nothing else comes along, the administration needs to pull out of its current tailspin before things become terminal.

On the political right, it is popular now to claim that Obama and his administration are irredeemably corrupt, a threat to Americans’ basic rights and liberties and dangerously soft on issues of terrorism and national security. Each of the alleged scandals speaks to one of these charges, even if the charges themselves are mostly hyperbole.

First: The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), America’s tax collection agency, where mid-level bureaucrats are accused of intimidating Obama’s political opponents. Most of the available evidence (including a report by the IRS’ inspector general) indicates that the real problem was a dysfunctional bureaucracy and its fumbling attempts to administer vaguely-written regulations. The IRS is not popular (what tax collector is?). So even though they lack substance, the charges play easily into Republican paranoia about taxes and Democrats in general and Obama in particular.

In many ways, the second “scandal”, the administration’s overzealous attempts to plug leaks to the media, is far more serious. In authorising secret monitoring of the movements, phone calls and email of some reporters Obama put himself in conflict with both his professed desire for a more open and transparent government and the American conception of press freedom. If this particular “scandal” has not gained much traction with the wider public that may be because reporters are only slightly more popular than the IRS.

The leak investigations (which focused on the Associated Press and a reporter for Fox News) were related to national security. This is usually seen as one of Obama’s strong suits, which is why the third alleged scandal — last September’s attack on the US diplomatic post in Benghazi — promises, in Republican minds, an especially great political payoff.

Yet, Benghazi, as a scandal, long ago passed the point of diminishing returns. The deeper Republicans dig the less substance their accusations appear to have. When the White House recently released all of the internal government emails related to the writing of UN Ambassador Susan Rice’s talking points for a series of TV interviews, the documents showed a lot of low-level bureaucratic infighting involving the State and Defence Departments and the CIA, but none of the high-level political manipulation Obama’s critics expected to find.

The problem is not these three individual messes so much as the collective impression they create. For the last two weeks, anyone following the news in the US has seen one story after another about an administration under political siege. This obviously is not good for Obama, but it is a long way from that observation to the conclusion that his presidency is in danger or his political influence irreparably damaged.

Some Republicans appear to understand this. Newt Gingrich, one of the people most responsible for Washington’s current culture of eternal trench warfare, recently warned his party against overreaching, arguing that focusing on scandals to the exclusion of everything else threatens to alienate voters and turn Obama into a sympathetic figure ahead of next year’s mid-term elections.

Other Republicans want to step up the fight. The Heritage Foundation, Washington’s most prominent conservative think tank, issued a statement last week urging congressional Republicans to keep the pressure on by avoiding votes on any issue that might divide the party.

Over the next month, as summer settles in and the news cycle slows down a bit, it will be fascinating to watch as the GOP debates these rival strains of political thought.

It is less than nine years since Obama first emerged on the national stage. In that time, political opponents have consistently underestimated him, even as he regularly turned their doubts to his advantage.

There could, of course, be some new political disaster just over the horizon, or new revelations that would turn one of today’s faux-scandals into the real thing. Assuming that is not the case, however, there is a difference between a presidency poised to implode and a president who is just having a bad month.

No one expects Republicans to like Obama, but if they learned anything from their political debacle last November it ought to have been that most Americans do not share their dark, conspiratorial vision of his presidency and that the president himself is hardly the inept buffoon portrayed in the conservative media. On the evidence of the last few weeks, these are lessons the GOP still has a problem with.

Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.