How Obama can avoid the second-term curse

WASHINGTON (USA TODAY) -- For presidents, practice apparently doesn't make perfect.

Those who win re-election can claim what would seem to be an invaluable asset: Four years of on-the-job training for one of the most demanding posts in the world. Yet the second terms of modern presidents typically are remembered for assorted catastrophes. Richard Nixon resigned. Ronald Reagan became enmeshed in the Iran-contra scandal. Bill Clinton was impeached. George W. Bush was buffeted first by Katrina and then by a cascading financial crisis.

As President Obama prepares for next week's inauguration, he acknowledges the cautionary history. "I'm more than familiar with all the literature about presidential overreach in second terms," he told reporters at a White House news conference after his re-election. He discussed the prospects and pitfalls of second terms last Thursday at a private White House dinner with nine presidential historians.

"By the time a second term rolls around, the illusions about a president have largely evaporated," says Robert Dallek, one of those invited to the dinner and the author of influential biographies of Presidents Lyndon Johnson and John Kennedy. "In second terms, the big problems that confront the country, and they're always there, more or less catch up with the incumbent."

To be sure, some presidents have scored significant achievements in their second terms, from the tax code overhaul signed by Reagan to the balanced federal budget during Clinton's watch. But advisers who have been there say the rhythms and political dynamics of the second term are different from the first.

"In the first term, you're running for re-election," says Ken Duberstein, White House chief of staff for Reagan during his second term. "In the second term, you're running for legacy." That impulse - "whether it's hubris or overreach or over-interpreting a mandate" - sometimes contributes to stumbles.

John Podesta, chief of staff for Clinton in his second term, says there's no "unifying physics theory" to explain the second-term curse, a concept that has become so accepted it has its own Wikipedia page. Despite that conventional wisdom, he says second terms also pose an opportunity for a president to deploy a more seasoned staff and exploit more executive powers.

USA TODAY asked top White House aides to Reagan, Clinton and Bush during their second terms for their tips, some reflecting hard lessons learned during their time in the West Wing. Here's what they told us.

1. Watch the clock

The Constitution says there are four years to a second term, but political reality says a president's ability to command public attention and compel congressional action begins to ebb well before that. "People tend to get tired of their president in the second term," says Frank Donatelli, second-term White House political adviser to Reagan.

"Certainly history has proven that second-term presidents typically get the most accomplished in their first year and a little in their second and then not a lot accomplished as the party fights over who the next standard-bearer will be," says Sara Taylor Fagen, political adviser in Bush's second term.

That means Obama's major legislative initiatives for his second term probably need to be spotlighted in his inaugural address next week and detailed in the State of the Union speech that follows next month. His opportunities are likely to shrink as time passes, and fast.

"It's the Benjamin Button theory of the second term," says former Clinton White House aide Chris Lehane, a reference to the 2008 movie and F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. "You have a year to 16 months, max, to do anything, at least domestically. You're going to age in reverse."

At the midpoint of Bush's second term, press secretary Dana Perino saw attendance at daily White House briefings drop as reporters shifted to the 2008 campaign. "Toward the end, I said, 'If we are on the front page of the paper, we have done something terribly wrong or have a huge problem,'" says Perino, now co-host of The Five on Fox News Channel.

Another potential problem: The midterm congressional elections. The president's party often suffers big losses in the sixth year of a presidency, although Democrats already may have taken much of that hit in the 2010 elections, when they lost control of the House of Representatives. Democrats probably will have more muscle in Congress for the next two years than in the final two of Obama's term.

"There's a little bit of a feeling that you become chopped liver in your seventh and eighth years as the campaign heats up," says Podesta, who ran Obama's transition operation four years ago and is now chair of the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning think tank. "The play is going to move on."

2. Pick a priority

The president can do something in his second term, the veterans say, but not everything. Fighting too many battles could mean winning none.

Obama has said his major goals for his second term include enacting a comprehensive immigration bill and energy legislation, and he has added gun control to the list since the December shooting rampage at a Newtown, Conn., elementary school that left 26 children and educators dead. In the next few months, he also faces the need to raise the debt ceiling and deal with automatic spending cuts that are poised to take effect.

Some veterans say his list is unrealistically long. "It's still not clear to me what they really want to do," Perino says.

The hard line Obama has drawn with Republicans on the debt ceiling risks sapping his political capital and leaving scars that will make prevailing on the other issues more difficult, Fagen says. "If he spends this year fighting with Republicans on the debt ceiling and the fiscal cliff, yeah, (House Speaker) John Boehner may lose the hand on that," she says, but Obama "is the one who is going to be harmed the most long-term."

After carrying 49 states in his re-election, Reagan focused on overhauling the tax code, and succeeded. Bush also picked a clear second-term priority - adding private investment accounts to Social Security - only to see it crash in Congress. His next proposal, to overhaul immigration, also failed.

Bush told reporters after his re-election that he had "earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it." To his dismay, he apparently hadn't earned enough capital to push through such divisive proposals.

Obama made a similar point at his news conference Monday when asked about a pending showdown with Republicans over raising the debt ceiling. "They've got a particular view of what government should do and should be," he said. "And, you know, that view was rejected by the American people when it was debated during the presidential campaign."

Obama needs to be realistic about not "misinterpreting the size of his victory," Fagen says. "That is a recipe for having a very long and cantankerous legislative session with little accomplished."

3. Fix a first-term problem

One good thing about second terms: It's a chance to reverse some of the errors made the first time around.

Bush made changes in his fractious national-security team during his second term, eventually installing new secretaries at the State Department and the Pentagon. Clinton was criticized during his first term for inaction on bloodshed in the Balkans; in his second term, he engineered a NATO bombing campaign that halted ethnic cleansing by Serbs in Kosovo.

Clinton also revisited the signature disaster of his first term, the failure of his proposed health care overhaul. In his second term, he pushed through several smaller pieces of legislation, expanding coverage for children and ensuring more insurance portability.

For Obama, the second term is an opportunity to show that the Affordable Care Act can deliver on its promise to expand health care coverage and control costs. Nearly three years after Obama signed the health-care overhaul, the public remains unconvinced. In a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll last month, just 30% of those surveyed said the law was going to make things better for their families; 40% predicted it would make things worse.

"You have to put an emphasis on the execution of the programs you put in place in the first term," Podesta says. "For Obama, that's a particularly critical chore with respect to health care. At the end of the day, passage of the Affordable Care Act is going to be the signature achievement of his first term, and it will only be viewed positively if properly implemented in his second term."

Duberstein suggests Obama also work to strengthen his ties to members of Congress. "It is not too late to build lasting relationships on both sides of the aisle, because it's a means to an end," he says.

4. Look abroad

While Watergate raged, Nixon got a hero's welcome in Moscow. During the aftermath of the Iran-contra investigation, Reagan signed an arms-control treaty with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Even after his successor had won the 2000 election, Clinton spent the final days of his second term trying to reach a Middle East peace deal that proved elusive.

During second terms, foreign locales can seem more appealing and more productive than domestic ones, especially when the next presidential election has taken over attention at home.

"There is a sense that presidents sort of end up concentrating more on foreign policy toward the end," Podesta says. "They certainly have more capacity to take the initiative. You can't ignore Capitol Hill, but you have much more power to take the initiative, so it's a natural place presidents late in their second terms go."

During his second term, Obama plans to withdraw most U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014, drawing America's longest war to a conclusion. With that, he could find a new opening to focus on the nations touched by the Arab Spring. That could involve the current violence in Syria and a potential crisis with Iran over its nuclear program.

That instinct to look abroad affects presidential spouses as well. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Laura Bush traveled extensively abroad during their husbands' second terms. Laura Bush went to Africa to spotlight the U.S. global initiative against AIDS and to the Arab world to promote the cause of women and girls in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

"You do have a tendency to work a little bit more on global issues in a second term," says Anita McBride, chief of staff for Laura Bush during her husband's second term who now runs a project on first ladies at American University. "You sort of realize you've got this worldwide platform to use."

5. Brace for trouble

The misbehavior that caused some of the most celebrated second-term scandals didn't actually happen during second terms. The Watergate misdeeds came during Nixon's 1972 re-election campaign, for instance. Clinton's White House liaisons with Monica Lewinsky began a year before his 1996 re-election.

In those cases, winning the second term gave time for misdeeds to become known and opened the door to full-blown investigations.

"The federal government is this enormous apparatus, and it's just a matter of time where somebody, somewhere winds up screwing up," says Donatelli, who now chairs GOPAC, a group that trains Republican candidates. "It takes awhile to work through the system, and for people to find out about it."

Whatever the origins and timing, every second-term president of the past half-century has had to contend with a major scandal involving themselves or, at times, officials acting without his knowledge. The Valerie Plame affair, which drew headlines in Bush's second term, was sparked by a newspaper column outing the identity of a CIA operate that ran more than a year before his re-election.

A scandal that could bedevil Obama's second term might have already happened, though he may not know about it yet.

"Almost by definition, because you've been in office so long, something is going to pop in a day and age where the opposition party in particular is looking to use the investigative process and the ethics issue as a partisan bludgeon," says Lehane, who worked on the Clinton White House response team for the Lewinsky and other investigations. He is the co-author of Masters of Disaster: The Ten Commandments of Damage Control, published last year. "Almost every single day, you're out there on a high wire with somebody jiggling it. Eventually, you're going to fall."