During the past presidential election, lots of reporters (including myself) wrote that there were many similarities between the 2004 and 2012 campaigns. The main parallel was a polarizing incumbent who was ripe for being defeated, running against a stiff Massachusetts politician who most folks didn't feel comfortable with.
But for Barack Obama and his supporters, they'd better hope that 2013 is better than 2005 was for George W. Bush. That's when 43's juice as commander in chief evaporated quickly. First it was his plan to privatize Social Security that went nowhere. Then in late summer there was the delayed response to Hurricane Katrina, followed in the fall by the debacle that was nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. His presidency was never the same after that.
Yesterday's revelation that the Justice Department secretly obtained the phone records of AP reporters seems something out of the 1970s Nixon White House, not something from a progressive administration.
Republicans have been pounding Obama so hard on Benghazi, to the point where their legitimate questions are obscured by their obsession to bring him down any way possible (worse than Watergate, Senator Inhofe? Really?) But with the revelations about the IRS targeting specific political groups, followed by this AP justice story, the White House is in crisis.
The president has to get ahead of these issues, or whatever agenda he hopes to achieve (already formidable against an intransigent group of House Republicans), will be impossible.
Marco Rubio shot out of the gate yesterday morning, calling for heads to role at the IRS. The only problem? The man who was in charge when all the shenanigans went on — the Bush appointee Douglas Shulman — left the job last fall.
More brain drain coming out of Tampa's City Hall with Siobhan Harley, special assistant to Mayor Buckhorn, leaving town to work as a political consultant in Nashville.
And in between everything else I did last weekend, I spent 90 minutes watching a documentary on the late conservative firebrand Andrew Breitbart (so you don't have to). But if you want to see Hating Breitbart, the film will open this weekend at the Veterans 24 theater in Tampa.
