IF THEY WERE TRYING TO INFLUENCE THE ELECTION, THAT WAS A DUMB WAY TO DO IT

Micah Cohen of The New York Times reports:

Public data from the Internal Revenue Service ... shows that dozens of Tea Party groups were approved for tax exempt status beginning in May 2012. That was the same month that Representative Dave Camp of Michigan wrote to the I.R.S. asking for information about all "social welfare" groups that had applied for tax-exempt status in 2010 and 2011, to determine whether the I.R.S. was targeting conservative groups.

The flurry of approvals that came in the next few months was a sharp break from the previous two years, during which the agency approved just a handful of 501(c)(4) applications from Tea Party groups....

Here's a chart showing the approvals by month:





If you were a nakedly partisan IRS employee, is this how you'd have helped President Obama win reelection? It's not what I would have done. Remember late 2011: Herman "Uzbeki-beki-stan-stan" Cain led the Republican presidential field for quite a while. Then Newt Gingrich, temporarily an honorary teabagger, led the field. Then, in 2012, Rick Santorum made his move.

If you'd wanted to help the president, I think you'd have wanted to unleash the teabaggers in 2011. I think you'd have wanted them free to make mischief for Mitt Romney -- who, for all his flaws as a campaigner, could have pulled out a win against Obama with a better-executed campaign, unlike, well, every candidate enthusiastically embraced by tea types (see also: Trump, Bachmann). And I think you would have wanted teabaggers more deeply involved in GOP House and Senate primaries. More Christine O'Donnells and Sharron Angles!

So if you IRS folks were monkeying with elections, you were screwing it up.