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politics and politicians Title: Obama Bully Pulpit Bullied With Congress Probes Obscuring Agenda By Julianna Goldman - May 24, 2013 President Barack Obama renewed his oath of office in January vowing to use the bully pulpit to rally the American people around his second-term agenda. Now, with a trio of controversies fueled by relentless attacks from congressional Republicans, the limits of the presidential megaphone are on display. Since it was revealed on May 10 that the Internal Revenue Service improperly screened Tea Party and other smaller-government groups seeking tax-exempt status, the president has struggled to shift the focus. Press conferences with foreign leaders, a new campaign to sell his economic plans and yesterday’s announcement of his new counter- terrorism policy have been overshadowed in news reports. “The bully pulpit has got a little bit of a drape over it when you’ve got everyone throwing rotten tomatoes over it,” said Mike McCurry, who served as press secretary to former President Bill Clinton. Obama has a limited window to galvanize Americans, put his stamp on revamping the nation’s immigration laws, pursue climate-change legislation and ensure that the plan to expand health coverage to tens of millions of the uninsured is carried out in the face of Republican resistance. Every day that his message is overtaken by the static noise of congressional probes -- into the Justice Department’s seizure of phone records from the Associated Press, the administration’s handling of the September attack on a U.S. outpost in Benghazi, Libya, and questions about what White House aides knew about the IRS scandal and when they knew it -- is a missed opportunity. Obama Speeches Obama has twice gone on the road to promote economic and education proposals from his State of the Union address. A May 17 trip to Baltimore to talk about infrastructure investments coincided with the first hearings on the IRS. The president used remarks at Morehouse College’s commencement ceremony and at a White House event to target key constituents -- young people and women -- as his health-care law moves into the make-or-break implementation stage. Yesterday at the National Defense University in Washington he said he’s revamping U.S. counter-terrorism policy to reduce the reliance on drone strikes against suspected terrorists and urged lawmakers not to block the shutdown of the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. In less than four hours, there was a new development in the IRS case -- that a key official had been placed on administrative leave. ‘Undermined Politically’ If Obama is unable to sway the public “and there is a real, genuine distracting scandal, then he’s hurt, he’s undermined politically in terms of his effectiveness as a leader,” said Robert Dallek, who is among a group of historians to have met periodically with the president. CONTINUED...
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