CBS NEWS
(CBS NEWS) -- President Obama won't formally lay out his second-term agenda until
his inaugural address later today, but the president has already made
clear some of the major issues he intends to take on over the next four
years.
He has signaled that his focus in the short-term is on passage of
corporate tax reform and new gun control laws as well as comprehensive
immigration reform legislation. Over the long term, Mr. Obama plans to
continue focusing on the nation's fiscal issues - including potentially
achieving the elusive "grand bargain" to address the debt and deficit -
continue the transition out of Afghanistan, and help shepherd the
implementation of the health care law, which has a number of major
provisions that kick in next year.
As he works toward
these goals, Mr. Obama will also have to fend off the sort of major
second-term setbacks that have hampered his predecessors as they tried
to push their post-reelection agenda. That could be harder than you
might think: Such setbacks have occurred so often that they've given
rise to a nickname - the "second-term curse" - that has been applied to
every reelected president dating back to Franklin Roosevelt.
Sometimes,
the "second-term curse" is invoked in reference to a scandal: Richard
Nixon and Watergate, Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, Ronald Reagan and
Iran-Contra. Sometimes it comes in the form of failure: Roosevelt and
his plan to pack the Supreme Court, George W. Bush's effort to privatize
Social Security. And sometimes it's a string of events: In addition to
the Social Security debacle, Mr. Bush saw his legacy tarnished by
fallout from the Iraq war and the government's response to Hurricane
Katrina.
"Second-term presidencies, at least since World
War II, have always been plagued by some kind of mistakes or scandal,"
said Ken Duberstein, who served as Reagan's White House chief of staff.
Duberstein attributed that fact in part to "a tendency for hubris that
if not checked goes toward overreach."
"Most second-term
presidents seem to believe that they have perhaps a stronger mandate
from the American people than they actually do," he said.
After he won reelection by 2.4 percentage points in 2004, Mr. Bush declared that
"the people made it clear what they wanted," adding that he "earned
capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend
it." He outlined his Social Security plan in February 2005 and
campaigned for the proposal during a 60-day national tour - only to see
support decline and congressional Republicans back away from the issue.
Stephen
Hess, who served in the Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford and Carter
administrations, said that a president needs to act "fairly quickly" in
his second term, since Congress will soon be looking to the next
election and treating the current president as a lame duck.
"It's
like an hourglass with the sand running out," said Hess. The "lame
duck" perception explains in part why presidents have historically
focused more in international relations in their second term, an area
where they have less dependence on winning over Congress.
Asked
to explain the "second term curse," Mark McKinnon, a former adviser to
Mr. Bush, attributed it to "fatigue, staff turnover and [the fact that]
presidents' have usually moved off their top agenda items onto
second-tier issues."
Historian Douglas Brinkley, meanwhile, argued that "the notion of the second term curse is a bit overplayed."
"It
stems from the fact that two recent presidents, Richard Nixon and
George W. Bush, had disastrous second terms," he said. "But really, a
lot of the great presidents would never have made it into greatness
without a second term. Take Bill Clinton. If it wasn't for the second
term, Clinton wouldn't have been able to have the budget surplus, which
is his great achievement now." Brinkley ticked off other second-term
achievements, including Reagan's diplomatic successes in the Cold War
and Dwight Eisenhower's establishment of NASA.
"President Obama shouldn't listen to all that noise about a second-term curse, because there's nothing to it," he said.
Still,
Brinkley acknowledged that second-term presidents "start becoming
irrelevant to the political process in the last two years." He said this
is a time that presidents should focus on "big things" that are outside
"the paradigm of just going mono-e-mono with Congress all the time."
"You
travel a lot," he said. "You go to China and try to improve U.S.-China
trade relations or try to make bilateral pollution standards. You try to
make progress in the Mideast peace dilemma, you go to countries that
have never had a presidential visit, where it would be historic. Perhaps
you go to the Arctic, which is melting right now, with a bunch of
climate scientists and glaciologists and talk about what's happening."
John Hudak, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, said there is a
simple explanation for why so many presidents have seen scandal in their
second term: They've been in office longer.
"The longer
that time goes on, the more likely it is someone is going to get into
some kind of trouble," he said. "Plus, there's more time for
investigating a scandal. The scandals that come out in the second term
often happened in the first term."
"If a scandal does
come up, and you can almost be certain one will, I think President
Obama's best approach is to look at what Presidents Reagan and Clinton
did in dealing with scandal," Hudak continued. "The key for president
Obama is to distance himself from it and work the press so he comes out
of it looking like a.) he's still doing a good job running the country
and b.) that his hands are clean, whether that's true or not."
After
four years in Washington, Mr. Obama appears to have shifted from the
more conciliatory tone he took with the GOP opposition early in his
presidency toward a more oppositional stance, one illustrated by his
recent refusal to negotiate on raising the debt limit. During a news
conference last week, Mr. Obama said that he liked House Speaker John
Boehner personally and had a "great time" golfing with him. But, he
continued, "that didn't get a [grand bargain] deal done in 2011."
Former Obama aide Jen Psaki said that the president has learned during his time in office.
"The
president is a pragmatist, and he wants to get things done," she said.
"And he knows that compromise is a part of that. And that's how he's
been able to move many things forward. But there's no question that he's
learned. He has learned that having the will of the American people
behind you and working directly with them is more important than having a
conversation within the cauldron of Washington."
Hess
argued that the president will have built a significant legacy if he is
able simply to oversee the implementation of the health care law passed
in his first term.
"He passed that, but it's got a lot of
rough edges," he said. "If only in the next four years, he got that
into working shape so that when he left the White House, he left that
behind, that's a pretty major step forward. It's up there with Social
Security and Medicare. So in some ways that's the most important."
Hudak said the president can't let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
"He
has to set aside what he would love to do for what he can do," he said.
"And if he focuses on what he can do, he'll have a hell of a list of
legislative accomplishments in his second term. But if he focuses on the
ideal, he'll have a 'second term curse' in terms of policy."
Duberstein
agreed, saying that "there's a tendency sometimes to overreach or to
have too many priorities or too many initiatives rather than order the
two, three, four items that I want to get done in my second term."
Brinkley, meanwhile, argued that the second term is the time for big,
dramatic action.
"People want something bold, something
memorable," he said. "They want to know, 'Where is he leading us? What's
the 'moon shot' of our time?'"
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