Do You Think Recent Scandals Will Hurt the President’s Second-Term Agenda?

After scandals plagued the White House last week, this week began with yet another one. However, according to the Huffington Post, President Barack Obama appears to have weathered the storms relatively unscathed – at least according to a recent poll.

The Huffington Post reported that the poll, from CNN and ORC International, found that 53 percent of Americans approve of the job the president is doing while 45 percent disapprove. This is the same as he was doing in the polls before the scandals hit. This recent poll was taken on May 17 and 18, and has a 3 percent margin of error, the Huffington Post reports.

The scandals began when the White House faced continued scrutiny on Benghazi then expanded to news of the IRS unfairly targeting conservative groups applying for tax-exempt status. The third scandal hit at the end of the week when it was revealed that the Justice Department had subpoenaed phone records from the Associated Press.

This week hasn’t started off any better. The Huffington Post reported Monday that the Obama administration had tracked the movements and correspondence of Fox News reporter James Rosen. The Huffington Post quotes from a story in the Washington Post that reported that the Justice Department not only tracked Rosen’s trips to and from the state department in 2009 in his efforts to get information on North Korea’s nuclear program, but also obtained a warrant on Rosen's personal emails.

The question is will any of these scandals inhibit the president’s ability to forge ahead with his second term agenda and which issue, if any, is likely to be the most damaging?