Obama slammed over ‘Nixonian’ moments

The controversies over the IRS’s overboard scrutiny of tea party, surveillance of Associated Press journalists and the cover-up of the Benghazi debacle are only the latest examples of Obama’s "Nixonian” moments.

The White House under Barack Obama has been willing to push the boundaries of executive power on many counts. Many Republicans have seized at these chances to compare him with one of America’s most disliked presidents and readily attacked the White House, pumping up its missteps into Watergate-like proportions.

The Washington Post has recently spoken out against Gate-styled criticism of the President saying, "Nixonian charges” were a rite of passage, in a sense, for every US president, especially in his second term. The 44th president has in fact plenty of company in the he’s-as-bad-as-Nixon club, the paper underscores, listing his predecessors, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.

The difference is, however, that stunts like Obama’s secrecy on the use of drone strikes, Beghazi talking points and an apparent crackdown on media allegedly to better protect state secrets were less expected to come from a president who promised the most open administration in American history.

On all these fronts, the Obama administration has made matters much worse for itself than Bush’s government did in its time. It initially failed to account for its response to the Benghazi attack, which killed four Americans, including US Ambassador Christopher Stevens. The Justice Department’s seizure of AP telephone records was widely perceived as an affront to civil liberties. And news that the IRS targeted conservative and patriotic groups for special scrutiny only strengthened the perception that the White House has become a carbon copy of Nixon’s administration.

In a nutshell, the current administration has showed far more continuity with the civil-liberties-trumping policies of Bush’s government than the majority of Barack Obama’s supporters would have imagined in 2009.

But, despite bearing a surface likeliness to Nixon’s belligerence and secrecy, the mishaps suffered by Obama administration only prove that this kind of behaviour goes deep down into the marrow of the White House.