Watergate came in Nixon’s second term; Iran-Contra struck in Reagan’s second term; and Lewinsky undermined Clinton’s second term. As Ron Brownstein noted the other day, “When you look through history, you really wonder why they spend so much money and time trying to get re-elected, because there’s a lot more unhappy stories.”
The key to excelling in a second term seems to be avoiding scandals. The current occupant of the Oval Office, meanwhile, has practically become a scandal magnet.
A series of scandals involving some of the most powerful Republicans in Washington have converged to disrupt President Bush’s agenda, distract aides and allies, and exacerbate political problems for an already weakened administration, according to party strategists and White House advisers.
Seeing this reminded me of a piece Kevin Drum wrote over a year ago, predicting that if Bush won a second term, we’d likely see a series of scandals take over the White House. Re-reading the piece, I think Kevin was onto something.
It’s a truism that as leaders become used to the idea that no one can really hold them to account, they increasingly push the envelope of acceptable behavior and eventually push too far. Not just in America, but in practically every democracy, this inevitably leads to abuses of power that eventually turn into scandals both small and large.
George Bush is more susceptible than most to this dynamic. Partly this is because his party controls Congress, so he has no real political oversight to keep him honest. But it’s also because both Bush and the current Republican Party leadership have already demonstrated a ruthlessness and disregard for traditional political norms unseen since Nixon was jotting down his enemies list: holding open votes while they bully recalcitrant colleagues, ramming through midterm redistricting, suspending the Freedom of Information Act in all but theory, and cavalierly hiding routine budget data from Congress — all combined with a general mania for secrecy that leaves even John Dean in awe. It’s a dangerous and intoxicating brew, and George Bush has demonstrated the combination of ruthlessness, siege mentality, and religious faith in his own righteousness that makes it almost inevitable that he will take a step too far.
There’s one element to this that I find particularly interesting: these “steps too far” were taken fairly early in Bush’s first term.
Kevin’s right, power seems to have a corrupting influence on too many people. By the time presidents are in their second term, they (and those around them) start to believe that they belong there. The White House is their house. They don’t need accountability because they’re in charge. It’s this kind of over-confidence that leads presidents down the wrong, ego-driven path.
Except that’s not what’s happened with Bush at all. Unlike most of his predecessors, who allowed selfish intentions to cloud their judgment after several years at the top, George W. Bush arrived at the White House that way.
Consider some of the scandals that have undermined Bush’s presidency — the Plame scandal, the Abramoff fiasco(s), Halliburton, policies allowing systematic torture, the countless Iraq-related lies, lying to Congress about the Medicare scheme, the pundit payola and fake-news segments, the cherry-picking of intelligence, the Downing Street Memo, the list goes on.
Did these come about after Bush became drunk with power in his second term? No, all of these came in Bush’s first term, some in his first two years. In other words, Bush is one of those special people who didn’t let entrenched power corrupt him; he ran the place from Day One like an organized crime family.
Of course, the Bush gang doesn’t see it that way.
Some administration allies lament the return of the scandal culture. “There was essentially none of that for the first five years,” said Indiana Gov. Mitchell E. Daniels Jr. (R), Bush’s first budget director.
Now, I don’t know what political universe Mitch Daniels was living in during Bush’s first term, but these scandals aren’t new, post-election creations. They were, to borrow a metaphor, bombs with long, slow fuses.