May 13, 2013 Our Ceaseless Circus By FRANK BRUNI
Four
Americans died in Benghazi, Libya: people with unrealized hopes, unfinished
plans, relatives who loved them and friends who will miss them.
But
let’s focus on what really matters about the attack and its aftermath. Did
Hillary Clinton’s presumed 2016 presidential campaign take a hit?
We
live in a country lousy with guns and bloody with gun-related violence,
manifest two weeks ago in a Kentucky 5-year-old’s fatal shooting of his
2-year-old sister, evident over the weekend in a hail of bullets at a Mother’s
Day parade in New Orleans.
But
let’s cut to the chase. Did Kelly Ayotte, the New Hampshire senator, safeguard
or endanger her political future by casting one of the votes that doomed
gun-control legislation in the Senate? And does the law’s failure mean that
it’s time to write the obituary for Barack Obama’s presidency, which has more
than 1,300 days to go, or can we wait — I don’t know — a week or maybe even two
to do that?
Now
we have a scandal at the Internal Revenue Service to factor in. And a scandal
it is, in urgent need of a thorough investigation, which President Obama
pledged at his news conference on Monday and which we’re very much owed.
But
before we get a full account, let’s by all means pivot to the possible
political fallout, politics being all that seems to matter these days. Will
Republicans ever trust and be able to work with the administration again? (This
is being asked as if there were all that much trust and cooperation in the
first place.) Have they finally been handed the cudgel that can whack Obama and
his crew into oblivion? Assess, discuss and please don’t forget to make
predictions about the 2014 midterms.
It
never gets better and may in fact be getting worse: the translation of all of
the news and of all of Washington’s responses into a ledger of electoral pluses
and minuses, a graph of rising and falling political fortunes, a narrative of
competition between not just the parties but the would-be potentates within a party.
On issue after issue, the sideshow swallows the substance, as politicians and
the seemingly infinite ranks of political handlers join us journalists in
gaming everything out, ad infinitum.
To
follow the debate over immigration reform is to lose sight at times of the 11
million undocumented immigrants in limbo and the challenge of finding the most
economically fruitful and morally sound way to deal with them and their
successors. No, the real stakes are United States Senator Marco Rubio’s
presidential aspirations. Will he pay a high price with the Republican base for
pushing a path to citizenship? Or will he earn necessary centrist credentials?
And
where does it leave him vis-à-vis Rand Paul and Ted Cruz, who are fellow
Republican senators itching for prominence and are also hypothetical primary
rivals? The next presidential election is three and a half years away — an
eternity, really — but instead of putting a damper on speculation, that time
span has encouraged it, letting a thousand theories and nearly as many
contenders bloom.
We
can wonder: if Clinton decided not to run, would a door open for another woman,
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of the New York? Just how well has Gillibrand
positioned herself for such a turn? That story is already out there, and in it
her record is framed largely in terms of her prospects for national office, as
if one exists in the service of the other, as if the point of a Congressional
seat is leveraging it into an even better, more regal throne.
What
about the actual business of governing? Between all the preening, partisan
cross-fire and of course fund-raising that consumes members of Congress, is
there any space and energy for that?
Not
much, to judge from either the sclerosis that now defines the institution or
the obsessions of those of us in the media. Our quickness to publicize
skirmishes and divine political jockeying abet both. Actors tend to do whatever
keeps the audience rapt.
At
Obama’s news conference, he breezed past the I.R.S. debacle too quickly, and
I’m not sure why he’d stayed mum until then. He flashed too much self-righteous
anger about the scrutiny of the Benghazi talking points, which strike to
important matters of accountability and credibility.
But
however self-servingly, Obama got one thing about Benghazi exactly right:
what’s most vital, and what’s being obscured, is how we improve diplomatic
security.
After
all, the fates altered most profoundly by the attack weren’t his or Clinton’s
or any other pol’s, but rather those of the four lost Americans: Christopher
Stevens, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith.
“We
dishonor them,” Obama said, “when we turn things like this into a political
circus.” Indeed. But it’s what we turn almost everything into.
