Similarly, Obama has given the GOP a legitimate beef regarding Benghazi, in big and little ways. We don’t know enough about what happened that night, and it sure smells like there was somethin’ funny going on. What was Ambassador Stevens doing there? Why was the attack on our consulate launched? Why didn’t Obama order a rescue effort during the multi-hour firefight–where the hell was he? If there was an order to stand down, who gave it? Why the robotic overemphasis on the imflammatory video? Surely Tom Donilon was up to something. Wasn’t the whole Libyan intervention, with its murderous and chaotic aftermath, a mistake in retrospect? Add in the inexcusable failure to hand over relevant emails–even now heavily redacted–plus all the declarations that there’s nothing left to discover, and it’s enough to drive you crazy. Enough to drive Republicans crazy, anyway. All going according to plan! The more legitimate the beef, the crazier they’ll get! The Clinton’s incessant lying about their private lives was enough to (legitimately) drive Republicans crazy too. But when they went crazy, they blew a layup election.

A “gaslighting” strategy would be a subtle variation of David Plouffe’s “stray voltage” gambit–under which the Obama White House provokes legitimate controversy, perhaps by releasing questionable, Pinocchio-baiting statistics (e.g. women earn 77 cents what men earn), in order to keep an issue in the public eye. Here the administration would provoke a controversy that’s so legitimate, and behave so maddeningly, that it distracts from issues the administration wants out of the public eye–all while it makes Republicans seem unappealing obsessed with the side issue.