New column: Where are the Obama scandals?

I have a new column in Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball on the striking absence of Obama administration scandals. Here's how it begins:

One of the least remarked upon aspects of the Obama presidency has been the lack of scandals. Since Watergate, presidential and executive branch scandal has been an inescapable feature of the American presidency, but the current administration has not yet suffered a major scandal, which I define as a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing. What happened, and what are the odds that the administration’s streak will continue?

For more, please read the rest of the column and the research (PDF) on which it is based.

Comments

[David in Cal]

In earlier comments, I pointed out that the media ignores evidence of Obama's mental limitations, such as his weakness at speaking without a teleprompter. One reporter went farther. She interpreted Obama's extemporaneous speaking deficiency as a positive. It's an amusing example of media bias:

In this article a reporter for the Los Angeles Times acknowledges that Obama is bumbling and inarticulate when speaking extemporaneously, but she says it's because he's brilliant.

It's not that Obama can't speak clearly. It's that he employs the intellectual stammer. Not to be confused with a stutter, which the president decidedly does not have, the intellectual stammer signals a brain that is moving so fast that the mouth can't keep up.

She also claims that his weakness at speaking extemporaneously makes him sound more left-wing than he really is.

And thanks to its echoes of the college lecture hall, you may think it comes across as ever so slightly (or more than slightly) left wing.

[Elizabeth]

You know, it could just be that Obama is, in fact, a man of integrity, who encourages his associates to act with integrity. It is astonishing to me that your article assumes that scandals--i.e., episodes of wrongdoing (as opposed to, for example, policy choices with which some commenters disagree)--are inevitable, and that Obama is merely "fortunate" in not having been found out. Yet. The basic premise of this is just wrong, and the use of statistics means nothing at all.

[David in Cal]

Does the media give Dems the benefit of the doubt with sex scandals? The usually sensible Howard Kurtz says no, citing Edwards, Spitzer, Clinton, and McGreevy. However, Newsbusters points out:

After all, it is common knowledge that Newsweek's Michael Isikoff, who was working on the Paula Jones case for the magazine at the time, had the Monica Lewinsky story ready to go only to have it squelched by top editors.

If Matt Drudge hadn't broken the story, America might never have found out what was going on in the Oval Office....

As for John Edwards, the National Enquirer first broke his sordid story in October 2007. It wasn't until July 2008 that mainstream media outlets thought it was newsworthy....

As for Eliot Spitzer, he now has his own show on the cable news network that also employs Kurtz. If Kurtz thinks this is the way conservatives are treated when caught with their pants down, one has to seriously wonder what the color of the sky is in his world.