Revisiting the Secret Service Scandal

The scandal over the conduct of Secret Service agents in Colombia seems to be receding as the media moves on to new stories and new scandals, though the politics of the scandal appears to be in no danger of going away. Opponents of President Obama have used the scandal to question his management style while his supporters have been at pains to criticize the agents while supporting both the agency and the administration. Careers have been ruined and more investigations may be forthcoming.

I thought about how the media has been instrumental in promoting the dominant narrative of agents-gone-wild while reading this report from CNN in which an author familiar with the Secret Service attempts to establish a counter-narrative. Using an almost “boys-will-be-boys” argument, the author suggests that both the events themselves and the resulting damage have not been nearly as significant as our media would have us believe. I haven’t seen any evidence that his argument is influencing the public debate.

Missing from most of the public narrative about this scandal has been any consideration of the foreign policy implications of the misconduct. Perhaps that is because, aside from the significant perceptual issues I mentioned in my last post, they are few in number. The news media told us breathlessly that the scandal derailed the Summit of the Americas. In reality, as Richard Feinberg points out in Foreign Affairs, the summit fizzled primarily because the U.S. was reluctant to give ground on an issue important to our hemispheric partners: inviting Cuba to attend the next summit. While it may be politically expedient to credit President Obama with a foreign affairs loss due to a scandal, the truth is both more complicated and far less sensational than a salacious scandal.

Image Credit: CNN