"Tricky Dick" to "Slippery ba'Rock"?

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, many true believers on the political right remained in denial that President Richard Nixon — 'Tricky Dick' as he would be remembered — had any knowledge of the illegal activities of his underlings. True believers on the political left are having the same problem today with the multiple scandals swirling around President Barack Obama. Will this president discredit his followers and perhaps be remembered as '"Slippery ba'Rock"?

In "A Crisis of Authority," WSJ's James Taranto writes:

Democracy is in peril: That is an emerging theme of the liberal left’s response to the Obama scandals. The argument misses the point, no doubt deliberately. What we are witnessing now is not a crisis of democracy but a crisis of authority. The administrative state, in thrall to a decadent cultural elite, has lost the consent of the governed.

Cataloguing several examples of denial and deflection by the political left's true believers, Taranto ponders the deeper meaning behind the Obama scandals:

As we wrote Friday, this will be a scandal like Watergate if it turns out that the IRS was acting under orders from Barack Obama or Valerie Jarrett. If the White House’s conduct turns out to be unimpeachable, then it is something far worse: a sign that the government itself has become a threat to the Constitution.

But it’s worth pondering how Watergate helped bring about the current crisis of authority. It oversimplifies matters only slightly to say the liberal left owes its cultural authority to three events in the 1960s and 1970s. The culmination of the civil-rights movement in 1964-65 established its moral authority. The antiwar movement’s success at securing defeat in Vietnam established its political authority. Watergate discredited the Republican Party. (It also made heroes of journalists provided impetus for restricting the political speech of those who are not media professionals.)

The political result of all this was more polarization. The ascendant left became dominant in the Democratic Party, driving conservatives into the Republican camp, which in turn encouraged liberal Republicans to become Democrats. The cultural result–the effect on journalistic, educational, charitable and scientific institutions–was both polarization and left-wing domination.

[snip]

If Obama is no savior, neither is he the devil. He is but a man who, through a combination of ambition, talent, character and luck, became the central figure in the left’s crisis of authority. That crisis had been building for decades, seems to be reaching a culmination now, and will be resolved we know not how, except that we expect the process to be convulsive.

[snip]

Let’s again quote Barack Obama, from his May 5 commencement address at Ohio State University:

Unfortunately, you’ve grown up hearing voices that incessantly warn of government as nothing more than some separate, sinister entity that’s at the root of all our problems; some of these same voices also doing their best to gum up the works. They’ll warn that tyranny is always lurking just around the corner. You should reject these voices. Because what they suggest is that our brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule is somehow just a sham with which we can’t be trusted.

His words were soothing, reassuring, like a lullaby. The scandals are a wake-up call.

Is democracy in peril? Is it really true that “we can’t be trusted” with America’s “brave and creative and unique experiment in self-rule.” That all depends on what the president meant by “we.”