The Importance of Scott Walker's Epic Obama Smackdown
 
 
The Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza notes that Barack Obama is having a spectacularly crappy week.
 
It’s only Tuesday. But President Obama is already in the midst of one of the worst weeks, politically speaking, of his presidency — besieged by an burgeoning scandal at the Internal Revenue Service, revelations that the Justice Department secretly obtained phone records of reporters at the Associated Press and ongoing Republican criticism over the terrorist attack in Benghazi last fall.
 
Any one of those stories would be enough to knock an Administration back on its heels.  All three — and with the IRS and AP stories coming in rapid succession over the past 96 hours — threaten to permanently derail Obama’s plans to fortify his presidential legacy in the first 18 months of his second term.
 
 
 
"This is Big Brother come to life and a witch hunt to prevent Americans from exercising their First Amendment rights," Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker wrote in a letter to President Obama on Tuesday morning.
 
While Jindal and Walker were referencing the IRS scandal in particular, their quote could also speak to the broader problem the Obama Administration is facing right now.  The idea of a government run amok, believing in its infallibility and broadly-defined right to do what it wants when it wants is a dangerous one for this President (or any president).
 
A few weeks ago, a Washington media type like Cillizza might have dismissed the Walker-Jindal letter as partisan sniping. This week, he cites it as identifying the central political problem of Obama's cumulative scandals. Times are changing.