The Guardian reports: It is not a comparison that many people thought would ever get much traction.

But, assailed this week by multiple scandals and at the mercy of a furious press, President Obama has endured a legion of pundits wondering if he is the 21st-century Richard Nixon – and whether his second term is already a lame-duck disaster.

Certainly conservative writers have leapt at the idea that the now beleaguered Obama can be mentioned in the same breath as the shamed 37th president who left office early after the Watergate scandal.

They have looked at revelations that the Internal Revenue Service singled out conservative groups and that the Justice Department targeted AP journalists in a secret sweep of their phones as signs that Obama’s administration is paranoid and over-reaching its power. Then they have added a healthy dose of outrage over whether or not the White House manipulated reaction to the death of four Americans in an attack on the US diplomatic mission in Libya.

“Benghazi, IRS – son of Watergate?” wrote conservative writer Cal Thomas amid a plethora of similar headlines. But it was not just the right wing. Liberal Democrat congressman Michael Capuano reacted to the IRS reports by saying: “There’s no way in the world, I’m going to defend that. Hell, I spent my youth vilifying the Nixon administration for doing the same thing.”

Indeed, even Buzzfeed used an animation of Obama’s face morphing into Nixon’s.

Long-time Washington observers have been shocked at how rapidly it seems that Obama’s second term appears to have come off the rails. [Continue reading…]