text: 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. ||||| It says something about the kind of fortnight the president has been having that the controversies facing his administration can be divided into tiers. 
   
   The Benghazi debacle and the IRS’s targeting of conservative groups are, as it were, “tier one” scandals: the former because it involves obfuscation and cynical political calculation in the matter of the murder of four Americans by jihadists, the latter because it comprises systematic governmental discrimination against conservatives for exercising the core right to political speech. 
   
   The Justice Department’s seizure of phone records from the Associated Press, by contrast, is at least for now a second-tier concern. The confiscation is sure to chill the AP’s relationship with its sources, and normalizing such a practice would certainly chill the exercise of a free press. And there are questions to ask about the wisdom of the Justice Department’s specific actions, and about Attorney General Eric Holder’s odd recusal from the proceedings — a decision about which he admits making no formal record, and that he says prevents him from testifying to specifics. But so far what we have here are possible excesses in the course of a legitimate investigation. The department was looking into a leak that compromised a U.S. asset in Yemen, an asset who had disrupted a terrorist bomb plot. Such leaks are illegal. They make America less safe. And the Justice Department is right to look into them. 
   
   But in all three cases — the first two emphatically, the third provisionally — there is a “there” there, whatever the administration, and its exhaustively circumlocuting spokesman Jay Carney, are claiming to the contrary. Congress should investigate. And though the AP story has angered some progressives, and the IRS story some vulnerable Democrats, it will fall on the Republicans to lead the way. 
   
   We urge them to do so with vigor, but also with a keen sense of the limits of political scandal. Republicans must guard against the temptation to count on scandal to deliver election victories in 2014 and 2016. 
   
   It is a lesson they should have learned in 1998. Republicans expected to make large gains in Congress that year but ended up losing five House seats and standing pat in the Senate. The problem was not so much that Republicans “overreached” in pursuing the impeachment of President Clinton, as the conventional wisdom has it. The Republicans that year did not really run on a promise to remove Clinton from office — or on any other agenda. Their strategy was to assume that the scandal would redound to their benefit, and that they merely had to sit back and let victory rain o’er them. It didn’t. 
   
   The current lot should not make the same mistake. Democratic scandal does not take the place of a Republican agenda. It does not reform the tax code or reduce the debt or ease regulatory burdens on small business. It cannot substitute for a strategy to replace Obamacare. By all means, Republicans should run against the president and his party — against their refusal to take the entitlement crisis seriously, against the implementation of their “train wreck” health-care law, and even against the unusually politicized executive-branch culture that contributed to the post-Benghazi cover-up. They should at the same time understand that a purely negative message, however justified, will not produce the governing majority Republicans should be aiming for in the next two elections. 
   
   Even worse than relying on scandal would be advertising the fact. Republicans should not indulge in public speculation about the electoral repercussions of these scandals for 2014 (much less 2016!). Doing so plays into the Democrats’ hands by making legitimate inquiries seem like opportunistic partisan exercises, and is thus likely to be a self-canceling prophecy. 
   
   Republicans should not jump to conclusions, either, about how high up the White House chain of command these scandals are likely to creep. The facts alone will determine that. And perhaps most of all, conservatives and Republicans should not talk loosely about impeachment. The overwhelming likelihood at this point is that Barack Obama will leave office on January 20, 2017. The main task ahead for Republicans is to build a post-Obama majority so that his governing philosophy departs too. ||||| He likewise had nothing to do with the Justice Department seizure of phone records of reporters for The Associated Press, aides say. The Benghazi dispute, he complains, is brazen politics, and the White House released e-mails Wednesday meant to show that the president’s close aides had little involvement in its most hotly debated aspect. He has no way to force Congress to pass even a modest gun-control bill, aides say, while the slaughter in Syria defies American capacity to intervene. 
   
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   All of which raises the question of how a president with grand ambitions and shrinking horizons can use his office. Mr. Obama may be right about some of the things he cannot do, but he has also struggled lately to present a vision of what he can do. 
   
   On Wednesday, the administration appeared to take a newly aggressive tack on three current imbroglios, pushing out the head of the I.R.S., releasing the Benghazi e-mails and announcing that it would revive legislation to protect journalists from legal jeopardy. The president also said he would hold a news conference Thursday. 
   
   The most obvious larger area for progress is immigration, where Republicans appear to want to reach a deal to improve their standing with Latino voters. Aides hold out hope for reaching a budget deal, resuscitating gun control and using executive authority to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. And Mr. Obama can shape policy by putting his health care program into effect, nominating federal judges and a Federal Reserve chairman, and withdrawing more troops from Afghanistan. 
   
   “I still think we have a chance to do some significant things,” said David Plouffe, his longtime adviser. “If we get immigration and something on economy and deficits, that would be a pretty banner year, given a divided Congress.” 
   
   He rejected the suggestion that Mr. Obama, who forced Republicans to accept higher taxes on the wealthy after re-election, has been too passive. “The notion that there’s some sort of easy leadership play that he hasn’t called yet that would unlock gridlock, that’s not a very sophisticated analysis,” Mr. Plouffe said. 
   
   Second terms have long vexed presidents, whether it was the Iran-contra affair for Ronald Reagan or impeachment for Bill Clinton. Much as Mr. Obama failed to win his first big post-inaugural priority in gun control, President George W. Bush saw his effort to revamp Social Security in his fifth year go nowhere. With violence spiraling in Iraq, Mr. Bush found it hard to regain traction. 
   
   Yet presidents have made breakthroughs in their second term amid Congressional investigations. Reagan signed a nuclear-arms treaty with the dying Soviet Union, and Mr. Clinton balanced the budget. Mr. Bush defied broad opposition to a troop surge in Iraq, fueling a turnaround there. 
   
   For Mr. Obama, the sharp drop in the projected deficit, announced Tuesday by the Congressional Budget Office, served as a reminder that if he finishes his term with a healthier economy, it may matter more to his legacy than this week’s setbacks. 
   
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   Still, the latest furors could harden an impression of an Obama presidency that has expanded the reach of government further than many Americans would like. And they can undermine a powerful tool of the presidency, the ability to focus public attention. 
   
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   Mr. Obama recognized the dynamic while a senator, telling aides that a president could drive just 15 to 20 percent of the public agenda; the rest of the time, he had to react. In that light, aides say, Mr. Obama maintains his famed equanimity and, free of campaign pressures, takes a longer view. 
   
   “Being in office for nearly four and a half years gives the president some perspective — it helps separate the signal from the noise,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a White House senior adviser. “When you have dealt with real life-and-death problems, the political ones seem much smaller and affect you less.” 
   
   Yet Mr. Obama also expresses exasperation. In private, he has talked longingly of “going Bulworth,” a reference to a little-remembered 1998 Warren Beatty movie about a senator who risked it all to say what he really thought. While Mr. Beatty’s character had neither the power nor the platform of a president, the metaphor highlights Mr. Obama’s desire to be liberated from what he sees as the hindrances on him. 
   
   “Probably every president says that from time to time,” said David Axelrod, another longtime adviser who has heard Mr. Obama’s movie-inspired aspiration. “It’s probably cathartic just to say it. But the reality is that while you want to be truthful, you want to be straightforward, you also want to be practical about whatever you’re saying.” 
   
   The cinematic allusion seems striking given Mr. Obama’s rejection of Hollywood’s version of the White House, what one former aide calls “the Harry Potter theory of the presidency,” which suggests that he could wave a wand and make things happen. At the White House Correspondents Association dinner last month, he bristled at the idea that he should pattern himself after Michael Douglas’s assertive character in “The American President.” 
   
   Turning to Mr. Douglas, who was in the audience, he jokingly asked what his secret was. “Could it be that you were an actor in an Aaron Sorkin liberal fantasy?” Mr. Obama asked. He added later, “I get frustrated sometimes.” 
   
   Mr. Obama was more scornful a few days later when a reporter skeptically asked about his prospects for further legislation. “As Mark Twain said, rumors of my demise may be a little exaggerated at this point,” he said. 
   
   This week, as Mr. Obama confronted a scandal frenzy unlike any he has faced, he let his guard down during fund-raisers in New York. “My thinking was after we beat them in 2012, well, that might break the fever,” he told donors. “And it’s not quite broken yet.” 
   
   He sounded almost plaintive in wishing he had more ability to advance his agenda. “I sure want to do some governing,” he told another set of contributors. “I want to get some stuff done. I don’t have a lot of time.” 
   
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   Still, as he was traveling on Marine One on Monday, Mr. Obama took note of news reports describing last Friday as a terrible day. “You know what was actually a terrible day?” an aide recalled him saying. “The day Benghazi actually happened.”
target: – 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.