Friday's Charlie Rose program included discussion of how the Obama administration's triple whammy – controversies involving Benghazi, the IRS, and the Justice Department – could reverberate in the attempt to pass immigration reform legislation. Here are comments of Bloomberg's Al Hunt, the Washington Post's Karen Tumulty, and CNN's Jessica Yellin:
HUNT: "This is going to be a dominant part of the news for the next two, three, four months. ...If the White House can't get out ahead of it ... they're going lose their voice on issues like immigration, signing up for the health care bill, fiscal fairness or whatever. So I think this is really a perilous time politically for President Obama ... For the president to have a good second term, he has to get a good immigration bill through. That's a sine qua non of everything. If he doesn't get that through, it's going to be really a dreadful year."
TUMULTY: "This is a president who knows that a second term is living on borrowed time. He does feel a real urgency. ...In talking to the people at the White House, that is what they think is the real cost of all these controversies – that it is sapping their time. It is sapping their energy and their focus at a time when they want to be doing other things."
YELLIN: "[President Obama] actually could have a very successful second term (despite) the controversies he's facing today. If he gets immigration reform done, that would be a major legacy accomplishment ... They're hoping here [at the White House] that if he does immigration that would break the narrative that he is entrenched in, this sort of swirl of ineptitude and controversy, and put him on a solid footing again."
