President Obama got personal in a heartfelt commencement speech Sunday, telling graduates he strives to be “a better man” — a sentiment Republicans in Washington were hoping for as well, as they demanded their own improvements from the White House.
“My whole life, I’ve tried to be for Michelle and my girls what my father wasn’t for my mother and me,” Obama said in an intensely personal graduation speech at Morehouse College, a small, historically black school in Atlanta.
“I want to break that cycle — where a father’s not at home, where a father’s not helping to raise that son and daughter. I want to be a better father, a better husband, a better man,” he said.
But while the President longs for more family time, his days in the Oval Office haven’t gotten any less life-consuming, as three wide-ranging scandals threaten his legacy.
In recent weeks, the GOP has launched a robust attack on the administration, which became mired in reports of misconduct at the IRS and a seizure of journalists’ phone records by the Justice Department, as well as a prolonged controversy over its handling of last year’s Sept. 11 attacks on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya.
On Sunday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, one of the administration’s fiercest critics, unloaded on the President, saying that a “culture of intimidation” perpetrated by Obama himself was behind the IRS’ targeting of specific conservative groups.
“What we’re talking about here is an attitude that the government knows best,” McConnell said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” after he was asked about the agency’s practice of singling out conservative and tea party groups for added scrutiny.
“The nanny state is here to tell us all what to do. And if we start criticizing, you get targeted,” he said.
Other critics of the President also suggested that political games at the IRS could have started at the top of the administration.
Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul accused the agency of circulating a “written policy” that “targeted people opposed to the President.”
“And when that (written policy) comes forward, we need to know who wrote the policy and who approved the policy,” Paul said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Ohio Republican Sen. Rob Portman, meanwhile, said Obama’s decision to fire two bureaucrats in the wake of the scandal wasn’t sufficient and called for a special independent probe of the matter.
“I think a special counsel is going to wind up being necessary,” he said.
While Obama requested and accepted the resignation of the acting director of the IRS this week after a Treasury Department inspector’s report uncovered the scandal, the President has continued to receive intense criticism on the issue.
On Sunday, Obama trotted out one his most trusted advisers to control some of the lingering damage.
White House senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer admitted Sunday that there is a “very real problem at the IRS,” but blasted Republicans for using the report to “make political hay.”
“We’ve seen this playbook from the Republicans before,” Pfeiffer said Sunday during a media blitz that saw him appear on five morning talk shows. “What they want to do when they’re lacking a positive agenda is try to drag Washington into a swamp of partisan fishing expeditions, trumped-up hearings and false allegations.”
The news wasn’t all bad for Obama, however.
Despite the barrage of serious problems, the President’s approval rating has remained steady, a new poll out Sunday morning showed.
Just over 53% of Americans said they approve of the job Obama is doing, while 45% said they disapprove, a CNN/ORC International survey showed.
The rating even marks a slight increase since April, before news of the IRS and phone record scandals broke, when a CNN/ORC International poll showed a 51% approval rating for the President.
