New Mexico Mercury

If you are President Obama surveying the scene from the Oval Office, here is what you might have seen last week:

• A House of Representatives committee finally negotiating a bipartisan deal on immigration, and doing so at the 11th hour just before negotiations would have collapsed.

Although it differs substantially from the bill moving through the Senate, the deal goes a long way toward assuring that some kind of immigration reform will eventually emerge from the congressional sausage factory.

• Meanwhile, the Congressional Budget Office, the nonpartisan, authoritative judge of all things budgetary, saying the unexpected strength of the recovery has increased tax receipts and reduced expenditures to a major degree.

They said the federal deficit, by 2015, will decline from 10 percent to 2 percent of the gross domestic product. This year’s debt has shrunk to about $600 billion, half what it was four years ago.

The 10 percent level of several years ago was regarded by nearly all economists as unsustainable and potentially disastrous. The 2 percent level is regard by the same experts as sustainable and relatively harmless.

In other words, the federal deficit, once the giant shadow looming over the federal government and the core of the Tea Party insurrection in the Republican Party, has suddenly ceased to be the be-all and end-all of federal policy.

The strengthened federal finances means the cap on federal borrowing will not need to be raised until October or November, instead of this month as originally forecast, thus postponing still another showdown between the White House and Republicans in Congress.

Thus this was perhaps the best week in the 4 1/2 years of the Obama administration.

But if you were President Obama sitting in the Oval Office you would also have seen this last week:

• The Department of Justice admitting to secretly subpoenaing scores of phone records of reporters and editors for the Associated Press, the most important news-gathering organization in the United States, the one that nearly every newspaper, magazine, TV station and web site depends on for information.

Such a subpoena has never before been sought by any administration. The stated reason for the subpoena was to pursue an investigation of which government officials leaked classified information about a successful effort to prevent a terrorist attack originating in Yemen.

What went unsaid is that every president and just about every senior national security official has leaked classified information since the classification system was created in the last century.

• The Internal Revenue Service confessing to illegally targeting groups whose names contain the words “Tea Party” or “Patriot.”  With moderate Republicans and even many Democrats piling on, the IRS case is becoming a cause célébre.

• The Department of Defense disclosing, first, that an Army officer and a sergeant assigned to investigate sexual abuse have themselves been accused of sexual abuse; and second, that episodes of sexual abuse have risen, to 25,000 cases in the past year, just as the Pentagon is struggling to expand women’s roles in combat. A top general called the sexual assaults “a crisis.”

• Nearly all the prisoners at Guantanamo continuing on an extended hunger strike and a number being force fed to keep them from dying. The hunger strike is the prisoners’ desperate reaction to Obama abolishing the office charged with closing the prison.

• The misleading administration statements after the fatal terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya, taking another turn for the worse as the administration releases about a hundred internal emails showing that the No. 2 CIA official, overruling the State Department and his own boss, eliminated reference to terrorism in the talking points intended to explain the incident to the American public.

Which is the true state of affairs? Great progress on big issues or a government besieged and floundering, the administration’s best or its worst week?

Both, of course.

Obama has tried to deal with the multiplying symptoms of a dysfunctional administration by searching (rather desperately) for a way out of Guantanamo; pressing for still more money for embassy security; introducing a law to shield reporters from prosecution (which, however, would not apply to national security cases such as the AP one); firing the IRS official in charge of looking into non-profits such as the Tea Party (although he will not leave until June, when he was going to leave anyway of his own volition); and trying to reinvigorate Pentagon efforts against sexual abuse.

Is all that enough?

Almost all the disaffected constituencies say no.

What is remarkable is how many people have been deeply offended by the failures of the past week: women, soldiers, reporters, conservatives, civil liberties advocates, journalists, Democrats, Republicans, independents, you name it.

Despite the two notable successes of the week, Obama may finally have succeeded in constructing an overwhelming national consensus, but not one that he can relish.

The great danger is not that any of these episodes will morph into a new Watergate and bring down the President. The great danger is that they will so disrupt, distract and derail the administration that the grave issues on its plate—including global warming, gun control, further debt reduction, unemployment (still at 7.5 percent), immigration reform, closing Guantanamo, an unprecedented trans-Atlantic trade deal, the use of poison gas in Syria, nuclear weapons in Iran and winding down the war in Afghanistan--will get lost beneath an avalanche of missteps and “gotcha” headlines.