In recent days, Democratic strategists have all but begged President Barack Obama to take control of a deepening public relations disaster that threatens to derail his second-term agenda. 
 
 On Wednesday evening, Obama began to do just that. The White House released 100 pages of emails and documents showing the evolution of the administration’s talking points about the Benghazi attack. Just over an hour later, Obama himself came to the podium to announce that he’d directed his treasury secretary to request the resignation of the acting IRS commissioner — and had gotten it. 
 
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 reset POLITICO Junkies: Obama damage control continues Obama IRS latest: ‘Inexcusable’ 
 
 The president also plans to appoint a new acting IRS commissioner this week, a senior administration official told POLITICO Thursday. 
 
 So has a string of decisive actions in the space of less than a day stopped the bleeding? 
 
 For Republicans, the answer is clearly no. They’re going to remain on the attack — and they’re upping their demands. Moments after Obama spoke, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus called on Obama to apologize to the American people. “Simply allowing the acting head of the IRS to resign is not enough,” he said in a statement. 
 
 (PHOTOS: 10 slams on the IRS) 
 
 And Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) said on CNN that while Obama “set exactly the right tone” on Wednesday night, the president must cooperate with Congress in the days ahead. 
 
 But after days of anxiety, Democratic operatives said the White House has found its footing. Still, happy as they were to see Obama win a news cycle, they insisted he’s far from being in the clear — Republican adversaries feel that they’re only just beginning, and they’ll have another chance to lay into the administration at Friday’s hearing on the IRS. 
 
 Obama’s top staff spent much of early Wednesday locked behind closed doors figuring out the best way to move ahead — without causing any new headaches — on all three fronts. The main problem, Obama aides say, was getting a fast decision on declassifying many of the Benghazi emails. 
 
 (PHOTOS: 10 slams on Obama and Benghazi) 
 
 Though the White House didn’t buy all of the advice that came from the outside — one Obama aide called the push for an external review a “half-assed” idea — there wasn’t much doubt that they needed to respond strongly, and they needed to get rid of IRS acting Commissioner Steven Miller. 
 
 “We needed to make sure we got it all right and could respond with as much force as possible on as many fronts as possible,” an Obama aide said. 
 
 (Also on POLITICO: State fretted over Benghazi talking points) 
 
 “Everyone says be fast, but fast is deadly if you are wrong. Always better to suffer through some news cycles to do it right, which is what the president did [Wednesday],” the aide added. “Our goal since Monday night when the AP revelation poured accelerant on the fire has been to tackle each of the three issues separately but forcefully and get back on offense as soon as possible. That wasn’t possible on Tuesday because we didn’t have the IG report and would not have been able to take decisive action at the IRS and we needed to get the emails declassified, which took time and pushed us into Wednesday.” 
 
 The president instructed Treasury Secretary Jack Lew to request and receive the resignation of acting IRS commissioner Steven Miller on Wednesday in the wake of the scandal over extra tax scrutiny given to conservative political groups. 
 
 The administration official said there is no timeline yet to appoint a permanent commissioner — which would require Senate confirmation. ||||| We are in the midst of the worst Washington scandal since Watergate. The reputation of the Obama White House has, among conservatives, gone from sketchy to sinister, and, among liberals, from unsatisfying to dangerous. No one likes what they're seeing. The Justice Department assault on the Associated Press and the ugly politicization of the Internal Revenue Service have left the administration's credibility deeply, probably irretrievably damaged. They don't look jerky now, they look dirty. The patina of high-mindedness the president enjoyed is gone. 
 
 Something big has shifted. The standing of the administration has changed. 
 
 As always it comes down to trust. Do you trust the president's answers when he's pressed on an uncomfortable story? Do you trust his people to be sober and fair-minded as they go about their work? Do you trust the IRS and the Justice Department? You do not. 
 
 The president, as usual, acts as if all of this is totally unconnected to him. He's shocked, it's unacceptable, he'll get to the bottom of it. He read about it in the papers, just like you. 
 
 But he is not unconnected, he is not a bystander. This is his administration. Those are his executive agencies. He runs the IRS and the Justice Department. 
 
 A president sets a mood, a tone. He establishes an atmosphere. If he is arrogant, arrogance spreads. If he is too partisan, too disrespecting of political adversaries, that spreads too. Presidents always undo themselves and then blame it on the third guy in the last row in the sleepy agency across town. 
 
 The IRS scandal has two parts. The first is the obviously deliberate and targeted abuse, harassment and attempted suppression of conservative groups. The second is the auditing of the taxes of political activists. 
 
 In order to suppress conservative groups—at first those with words like "Tea Party" and "Patriot" in their names, then including those that opposed ObamaCare or advanced the Second Amendment—the IRS demanded donor rolls, membership lists, data on all contributions, names of volunteers, the contents of all speeches made by members, Facebook posts, minutes of all meetings, and copies of all materials handed out at gatherings. Among its questions: What are you thinking about? Did you ever think of running for office? Do you ever contact political figures? What are you reading? One group sent what it was reading: the U.S. Constitution. 
 
 The second part of the scandal is the auditing of political activists who have opposed the administration. The Journal's Kim Strassel reported an Idaho businessman named Frank VanderSloot, who'd donated more than a million dollars to groups supporting Mitt Romney. He found himself last June, for the first time in 30 years, the target of IRS auditors. His wife and his business were also soon audited. Hal Scherz, a Georgia physician, also came to the government's attention. He told ABC News: "It is odd that nothing changed on my tax return and I was never audited until I publicly criticized ObamaCare." 
 
 Franklin Graham, son of Billy, told Politico he believes his father was targeted. A conservative Catholic academic who has written for these pages faced questions about her meager freelance writing income. Many of these stories will come out, but not as many as there are. People are not only afraid of being audited, they're afraid of saying they were audited. 
 
 All of these IRS actions took place in the years leading up to the 2012 election. They constitute the use of governmental power to intrude on the privacy and shackle the political freedom of American citizens. The purpose, obviously, was to overwhelm and intimidate—to kill the opposition, question by question and audit by audit. 
 
 It is not even remotely possible that all this was an accident, a mistake. Again, only conservative groups were targeted, not liberal. It is not even remotely possible that only one IRS office was involved. 
 
 Lois Lerner, who oversees tax-exempt groups for the IRS, was the person who finally acknowledged, under pressure of a looming investigative report, some of what the IRS was doing. She told reporters the actions were the work of "frontline people" in Cincinnati. But other offices were involved, including Washington. It is not even remotely possible the actions were the work of just a few agents. This was more systemic. It was an operation. The word was out: Get the Democratic Party's foes. It is not remotely possible nobody in the IRS knew what was going on until very recently. The Washington Post reported efforts to target the conservative groups reached the highest levels of the agency by May 2012—far earlier than the agency had acknowledged. Reuters reported high-level IRS officials, including its chief counsel, knew in August 2011 about the targeting. 
 
 The White House is reported to be shellshocked at public reaction to the scandal. But why? Were they so highhanded, so essentially ignorant, that they didn't understand what it would mean to the American people when their IRS—the revenue-collecting arm of the U.S. government—is revealed as a low, ugly and bullying tool of the reigning powers? If they didn't know how Americans would react to that, what did they know? I mean beyond Harvey Weinstein's cellphone number. 
 
 And why—in the matters of the Associated Press and Benghazi too—does no one in this administration ever take responsibility? Attorney General Eric Holder doesn't know what happened, exactly who did what. The president speaks in the passive voice. He attempts to act out indignation, but he always seems indignant at only one thing: that he's being questioned at all. That he has to address this. That fate put it on his plate. 
 
 We all have our biases. Mine is for a federal government that, for all the partisan shootouts on the streets of Washington, is allowed to go about its work. That it not be distracted by scandal, that political disagreement be, in the end, subsumed to the common good. It is a dangerous world: Calculating people wish to do us harm. In this world no draining, unproductive scandals should dominate the government's life. Independent counsels should not often come in and distract the U.S. government from its essential business. 
 
 But that bias does not fit these circumstances. 
 
 Peggy Noonan's Blog Daily declarations from the Wall Street Journal columnist. 
 
 What happened at the IRS is the government's essential business. The IRS case deserves and calls out for an independent counsel, fully armed with all that position's powers. Only then will stables that badly need to be cleaned, be cleaned. Everyone involved in this abuse of power should pay a price, because if they don't, the politicization of the IRS will continue—forever. If it is not stopped now, it will never stop. And if it isn't stopped, no one will ever respect or have even minimal faith in the revenue-gathering arm of the U.S. government again. 
 
 And it would be shameful and shallow for any Republican operative or operator to make this scandal into a commercial and turn it into a mere partisan arguing point and part of the game. It's not part of the game. This is not about the usual partisan slugfest. This is about the integrity of our system of government and our ability to trust, which is to say our ability to function. ||||| Things go wrong in government. Sometimes it's just bad luck. Sometimes it's rank incompetence. Sometimes it's criminal wrongdoing. Most of the time you never hear about it. Or, if you do hear about it, the media eventually gets bored talking about it (see warming, global). 
 
 But every so often an instance of government wrongdoing sprouts wings and becomes something quite exciting: A political scandal. 
 
 
 
 President Obama speaks about the IRS and Benghazi at a news conference. (Washington Post) 
 
 The crucial ingredient for a scandal is the prospect of high-level White House involvement and wide political repercussions. Government wrongdoing is boring. Scandals can bring down presidents, decide elections and revive down-and-out political parties. Scandals can dominate American politics for months at a time. 
 
 On Tuesday, it looked like we had three possible political scandals brewing. Two days later, with much more evidence available, it doesn't look like any of them will pan out. There'll be more hearings, and more bad press for the Obama administration, and more demands for documents. But -- and this is a key qualification -- absent more revelations, the scandals that could reach high don't seem to include any real wrongdoing, whereas the ones that include real wrongdoing don't reach high enough. Let's go through them. 
 
 (Photo by Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg) 
 
 1) The Internal Revenue Service: The IRS mess was, well, a mess. But it's not a mess that implicates the White House, or even senior IRS leadership. If we believe the agency inspector general's report, a group of employees in a division called the "Determinations Unit" -- sounds sinister, doesn't it? -- started giving tea party groups extra scrutiny, were told by agency leadership to knock it off, started doing it again, and then were reined in a second time and told that any further changes to the screening criteria needed to be approved at the highest levels of the agency. 
 
 The White House fired the acting director of the agency on the theory that somebody had to be fired and he was about the only guy they had the power to fire. They're also instructing the IRS to implement each and every one of the IG's recommendations to make sure this never happens again. 
 
 If new information emerges showing a connection between the Determination Unit's decisions and the Obama campaign, or the Obama administration, it would crack this White House wide open. That would be a genuine scandal. But the IG report says that there's no evidence of that. And so it's hard to see where this one goes from here. 
 
 
 
 The U.S. diplomatic post in Benghazi in flames after the attack of Sept. 11, 2012. (Esam Omran Al-Fetori/Reuters) 
 
 2) Benghazi: We're long past the point where it's obvious what the Benghazi scandal is supposed to be about. The inquiry has moved on from the events in Benghazi proper, tragic as they were, to the talking points about the events in Benghazi. And the release Wednesday night of 100 pages of internal e-mails on those talking points seems to show what my colleague Glenn Kessler suspected: This was a bureaucratic knife fight between the State Department and the CIA. 
 
 As for the White House's role, well, the e-mails suggest there wasn't much of one. "The internal debate did not include political interference from the White House, according to the e-mails, which were provided to congressional intelligence committees several months ago," report The Washington Post's Scott Wilson and Karen DeYoung. As for why the talking points seemed to blame protesters rather than terrorists for the attack that killed the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans? Well: 
 
 According to the e-mails and initial CIA-drafted talking points, the agency believed the attack included a mix of Islamist extremists from Ansar al-Sharia, a group affiliated with al-Qaeda, and angry demonstrators. White House officials did not challenge that analysis, the e-mails show, nor did they object to its inclusion in the public talking points. But CIA deputy director Michael Morell later removed the reference to Ansar al-Sharia because the assessment was still classified and because FBI officials believed that making the information public could compromise their investigation, said senior administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe the internal debate. 
 
 So far, it's hard to see what, exactly, the scandal here is supposed to be. 
 
 
 
 U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder in the hot seat. (AP Photo) 
 
 3) AP/Justice Department:. This is the weirdest of the three. There's no evidence that the DoJ did anything illegal. Most people, in fact, think it was well within its rights to seize the phone records of Associated Press reporters. And if the Obama administration has been overzealous in prosecuting leakers, well, the GOP has been arguing that the White House hasn't taken national security leaks seriously enough. The AP/DoJ fight has caused that position to flip, and now members of Congress are concerned that the DoJ is going after leaks too aggressively. But it's hard for a political party to prosecute wrongdoing when they disagree with the potential remedies. 
 
 Insofar as there's a "scandal" here, it's more about what is legal than what isn't. The DoJ simply has extraordinary power, under existing law, to spy on ordinary citizens -- members of the media included. The White House is trying to change existing law by encouraging Sen. Chuck Schumer to reintroduce the Media Shield Act. The Post's Rachel Weiner has a good rundown of what the bill would do. It's likely that the measure's national security exemption would make it relatively toothless in this particular case, but if Congress is worried, they always can -- and probably should -- take that language out. Still, that legislation has been killed by Republicans before, and it's likely to be killed by them again. 
 
 The scandal metanarrative itself is also changing. Because there was no actual evidence of presidential involvement in these events, the line for much of this week was that the president was not involved enough in their aftermath. He was "passive." He seemed to be a "bystander." His was being controlled by events, rather than controlling them himself. 
 
 That perception, too, seems to be changing. Mike Allen's Playbook, which is ground zero for scandal CW, led Thursday with a squib that says "the West Wing got its mojo back" and is "BACK ON OFFENSE." Yes, the caps are in the original. 
 
 The smarter voices on the right are also beginning to counsel caution. "While there’s still more information to be gathered and more investigations to be done, all indications are that these decisions – on the AP, on the IRS, on Benghazi – don’t proceed from [Obama]," wrote Ben Domenech in The Transom, his influential conservative morning newsletter. "The talk of impeachment is absurd. The queries of 'what did the president know and when did he know it' will probably end up finding out “'just about nothing, and right around the time everyone else found out.'” 
 
 I want to emphasize: It's always possible that evidence could emerge that vaults one of these issues into true scandal territory. But the trend line so far is clear: The more information we get, the less these actually look like scandals. 
 
 And yet, even if the scandals fade, the underlying problems might remain. The IRS. could give its agents better and clearer guidance on designating 501(c)(4), but Congress needs to decide whether that status and all of its benefits should be open to political groups or not. The Media Shield Act is not likely to go anywhere, and even if it does, it doesn't get us anywhere close to grappling with the post-9/11 expansion of the surveillance state. And then, of course, there are all the other problems Congress is ignoring, from high unemployment to sequestration to global warming. When future generations look back on the scandals of our age, it'll be the unchecked rise in global temperatures, not the Benghazi talking points, that infuriate them.
– Enter the new narrative from the DC press corps: The White House is shifting from offense to defense on scandals, or as Politico puts it, "President Obama tries to stop the bleeding." Obama fired the IRS chief yesterday, released Benghazi emails, and got a new press-shield law in the works in response to the trio of recent scandals. The upshot? "After days of anxiety, Democratic operatives said the White House has found its footing," writes Jennifer Epstein. "But happy as they were to see Obama win a news cycle, they insisted he’s far from being in the clear—Republican adversaries feel that they’re only just beginning, and they’ll have another chance to lay into the administration at Friday’s hearing on the IRS." The New York Times, meanwhile, has a front-page analysis that says a quick fix is out of the question. ("An Onset of Woes Raises Questions on Obama Vision" reads the headline.) Yes, the president got aggressive, but "at times, Mr. Obama comes across as something of a bystander occupying the most powerful office in the world, buffeted by partisanship and forces beyond his control," writes Peter Baker. The president is clearly vulnerable, and Republicans must press these investigations, writes the conservative National Review. But they shouldn't be licking their chops: "Democratic scandal does not take the place of a Republican agenda," write the editors.