In the folklore of American politics, the second term is when Presidents falter, when anything that can go wrong under their watch goes wrong.
Nothing seems to work according to plan. At a time their eyes are fixed on their legacy and their minds concentrated on how they can can best shape and consolidate it, they find themselves buffeted by events over which they have little control — events and developments that may not only undermine how they would like to be remembered, but damage it fatally.
Reckoning from the time of Richard Nixon, there is more than anecdotal support for this piece of native wisdom.
In the 1968 Presidential election, Nixon defeated his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey handily. His escalation of the Vietnam War and his domestic policies stirred much domestic unrest. But going to China, thus ending the American delusion that propped up Taiwan for decades in the UN Security Council as a state actor and the authentic representative of the Chinese people, he won respect across the world as an authentic statesman.
He had in his corner, remember, the brilliant but frighteningly amoral Dr Henry “Super K” Kissinger, first as his National Security Adviser and later as his Secretary of State.
Four years later, Nixon won reëlection even more handily. In the race, he urged voters to compare his “law and order” credentials to the appeal of his opponent George McGovern, to the dishevelled anti-war elements stirring up things on the campuses and in the streets. Driven more by cynicism and expediency than high-mindedness, he ended the Vietnam War, brought home the troops, and it seemed he was headed to be counted among America’s great presidents.
By the half-way mark in his second term, he was hobbled by what was at first dismissed as a third-rate burglary carried out by some inept political operatives: a break- in at the offices of the opposition Democratic Party at the Watergate Hotel, in Washington, DC. Nixon’s fingerprints were all over the break-in, in the attempt to cover it up, and in so many other acts, summed up by the term Watergate” that brought his office into disrepute.
He resigned in disgrace, to avert impeachment
Ronald Reagan rode to the White House in 1980 on the back of conservative resurgence, the frustration and impotence that swept the country when 52 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in Iran during the revolution that toppled the monarchy and brought Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to power during President Jimmy Carter’s luckless term. An attempt to rescue the hostages failed even before it really got underway, deepening America’s sense of impotence.
The conservative resurgence that had buoyed Reagan to The White House grew from strength and saw him to a second term, which he won by a landslide victory over Walter Mondale, his Democratic opponent, and promised to carry him through his second term.
But the Iran-Contra scandal supervened and cast a pall over the second term and indeed his presidency. By the time Reagan left office, dementia had set in, reducing his presidency to a holding action
Bill Clinton’s first term was successful by any measure; the economy that had contracted in the Reagan years expanded, and his leadership in the Balkan crisis resonated across the world.
His second term was consumed by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. So toxic did the scandal render Clinton that, in his 2000 presidential campaign, his vice president and Democratic candidate, Al Gore, would not even stake a claim on a share of the glittering achievements of the Clinton Administration, especially on the economic front.
George W. Bush owed his victory in the 2000 presidential election more to the Supreme Court of the United States than to the electorate. The 9/11 terrorist attack transformed his shaky and tentative start into an assertive control that propelled him to invade and devastate Iraq in a quest to rid the world of that nation’s arsenal of “weapons of mass destruction.”
The weapons, it turned out, did not exist; they were a manufactured pretext for war. But victory in the war soon turned sour, and Bush’s dream of going down in history as an all-conquering war-time leader evaporated. Nor was that all; he squandered the hefty budget surplus of the Clinton years on tax cuts for the wealthy and plunged the economy into a recession from which it is yet to recover. The glory of the first term turned to ashes in the second.
And now, Barack Obama.
No sooner had he started his second term, after giving his Republican opponent Mitt Romney a severe thumping, than the term ran into contrary winds. The Republican faithful, sworn to ensure that Obama failed, thought they had found a promising opening when they put it out that the Internal Revenue Service had, for political reasons, scrutinised the tax returns of organisations with a conservative leaning more closely than those of organisations with a liberal leaning.
So heavy was the drumbeat that the head of the IRS had to resign. That did not placate them. They branded the allegation a scandal of Watergate proportions that called for nothing less than the President’s impeachment.
It would later turn out that the IRS had in this matter been an equal-opportunity inquisitor, scrutinising the tax returns of liberal-leaning organisations no less rigorously than the returns of conservative-leaning groups.
The furore had not quite subsided when it came to light that the national Security Agency had been spying without warrant and without probable cause on millions of Americans and indeed foreigners, tapping into their e-mails and text messages and other electronic transactions, and invading their privacy in ways that George Orwell’s Big Brother could never have devised.
And now, an off-the cuff remark that the use of chemical weapons in the festering civil war in Syria would “cross the line” and warrant an appropriate response is haunting Obama in ways he could never have imagined, this polished political actor who usually picks his words with the utmost deliberation.
It appears that chemical weapons have indeed been used, but it is not clear beyond a reasonable doubt who used them, and on whose orders. Nevertheless, the powerful lobby for military intervention is holding Obama to his word. The coalition he was counting on to deliver an appropriate response has dissolved in the face of opposition from a war-weary public that remembers all too clearly the propaganda about Iraq’s alleged weapons of mass destruction, the casus belli that turned out to be a phantom.
When they hear British Prime Minister David Cameron declare that everything they know points to Bashar al-Assad as the perpetrator of the horrid attack that put hundreds of Syrians to agonising deaths, and that it was all a matter of “judgment,” a great many in the attentive audience rejoin: We’ve heard that before, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. And the case turned out to be bogus through and through.
When U.S. Secretary of State asserts that the charges he had laid out against al-Assad were based on “facts” and were a matter of commonsense,” he reminds his audience of similar assertions before the United Nations Security Council by Colin Powell, his predecessor twice removed, in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq. And their response? “We heard that before. Tell us another.”
Obama now finds himself obliged, in the face of public skepticism, if not outright opposition, to seek the approval of the U.S. Congress before launching the bombing raids on Syria he had vowed with such unaccustomed casuistry to execute, effectively shifting responsibility to that body.
No outcome is guaranteed. Nor is it clear whether the approval he is seeking is definitive or merely advisory.
What is clear is that the curse –more likely the fatigue — of the Second Term is now upon the Obama Administration. Barely one year into the term, Obama’s sure-footedness is no longer evident, his agenda seems to have come unstuck, his momentum is out of kilter, and the immediate future promises more of the same.
But it is too early to count him out. He is a student of history. He knows the burden he carries as the first African American president. In spite of the disloyal opposition, he will find ways to regain his momentum.
