Kelly McParland: Obama doesn’t need opponents to land himself in trouble

The Tea Party missed its opportunity. Rather than drag the U.S. through a manufactured economic crisis, as they did through much of the Fall, they should have left the President alone. He’s doing an excellent job of getting into trouble all on his own.

Mr. Obama is, at present, enmeshed in two giant scandals, which is one more than Stephen Harper has to contend with.  And with much broader ramifications. Canada will not sink or swim on the issue of Mike Duffy holding onto to his Senate medical benefits, but Mr. Obama’s reputation at home and abroad is taking a mighty kicking thanks to the activities of his government. And Mr. Obama has German Chancellor Angela Merkel on his case, which has got to be a lot more daunting that questions from Justin Trudeau.

On the home front, Mr. Obama is faced with daily reports of new difficulties with his landmark health-care plan, which has been rolling out with all the smooth precision of a tank falling off a cliff. On the international front, he is trying to explain why Washington felt the need to spy on its closest allies, to the extent of tapping the phones of their leaders.

The Obamacare disaster is the more personally humiliating of the two. The plan is the signature achievement of his administration, but glitches in the launch resulted in the system almost immediately seizing up, blocking millions of Americans from getting the easy access to coverage they were promised.  There are plenty of excuses and finger-pointing going on, but the bottom line is that Mr. Obama controlled the timing for the plan’s introduction, and thus the fate of its introduction, which has been monumentally botched.

Officials responsible for the roll-out have been deep into self-flagellation, offering abject apologies and declaring the misery they feel at the problems they’ve caused Americans.  The trouble has only grown however: technical glitches are one thing, but this week hundreds of thousands of Americans began receiving notices that their existing healthcare plans will be cancelled, despite the President’s pledge that no one would lose their doctor or their plan if they wanted to keep it.

Grilled at a Congressional hearing over the various snafus Wednesday, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius insisted the promise had been kept, despite the cancellation notices. The promise only applied to plans purchased before Obamacare became law, and which remain unchanged since then, she indicated. It’s not an explanation likely to receive much welcome out in the heartland.

The White House is having just as much trouble explaining to allies why the National Security Agency spied on them for years, including putting a tap on the phone of Ms. Merkel. The German leader sent  her top foreign and intelligence officials to Washington on Wednesday to demand answers to the spying program, and to press the White House to accept a “no spying” agreement. A delegation representing the European Union has already been to Washington with the same questions

Mr. Obama says he didn’t know about the tap on Merkel until recently, and promised it had been ended. The Germans say that’s not good enough, that the continuing revelations from former NSA agent Edward Snowden have raised serious doubts about Washington’s trustworthiness. German newspapers report that Obama actually learned of the tap in 2010 and did nothing to stop it.

Trust is at the heart of both problems. Mr. Obama is left looking uninformed on the activities of the vast U.S. intelligence network, even regarding its most sensitive actions. And his abilities as a manager or chief executive hardly shine in the wake of the Obamacare mess.

Which suggests the President doesn’t need Republican hardliners to make his life miserable. He does a far better job when left to his own devices.

National Post