The lame-duck chatter has started ridiculously early - like always
It’s started early.
A July USA Today editorial had the headline: Obama’s 2nd term travails: A lame duck before his time?” The piece observed: “The woes of a second term are nothing new, but for President Obama they seem to have started sooner and struck harder than for his predecessors.”
A CNN opinion editorial, also in July, asked: “Is Obama a powerless lame duck?”
A CBS article, written way back in December of 2013, asked: “Is President Obama a lame duck already?”
One of the biggest challenges a second term president faces is avoiding the perception that he is a lame duck. The constant drumbeat from media and political elites about a president’s lame duck status, may actually have the impact of accentuating that status, giving the phenomenon a bit of a self-fulfilling quality.
There can be a perception of burnout or fatigue. Losses in the midterm elections of a president’s second term give the opposition party the power to investigate the administration. A president’s political coalition tends to fragment over time. The president’s supporters know that this may be their last chance to get what they want, so there is often impatience with the president, which is heightened by unrealistic expectations. Members of Congress and other ambitious politicians increasingly resist the president, and his policies, as they jockey for position in the next presidential election. Opponents are prepared to double down in their obstruction to destroy the legacy of the White House and prevent a departing president from making gains that will benefit his party.
In some parts of the media, a notion has taken hold that Mr. Obama’s Presidency is approaching, or has already entered lame duck status, far earlier than is normal. A look back at the prevailing attitudes during the second terms of his predecessors shows this is not true – and reveals that more is often achieved in the last two years of an administration than is commonly expected.
In April of 2005, the Salt Lake Tribune ran a story with the header, “Bush’s 2nd-term agenda seems to be petering out. And the sub-header; On a limb: Some analysts say the Bush administration is quacking like a lame duck and polls say job approval ratings are slipping,”
In September of 2005, Jim Lobe, of the Inter Press News Service, wrote an Op-Ed titled: “Sailing Toward Lame Duck Land on Katrina’s Waters,”
Bill Schneider, of CNN wrote a piece: “Signs of a lame duck president?” in October of 2005.
Prior to the Democratic sweep in the mid-terms in 2006, the New Republic wrote an editorial simply titled: “Crispy Duck.”
In a CBS News piece, in May of 2006, Dick Meyer declared: “Bush Is Now A Lame Duck. Forget November, Forget ’08; President Is Done,”
In October, Peter Baker and Michael A. Fletcher of the Washington Post declared: “Elections May Leave Bush An Early Lame Duck,”
A Newsweek story announced in early 2007: “With Bush widely viewed as an ineffectual ‘lame duck’ (by 71 percent of all Americans), over half (53 percent) of the poll’s respondents now say they believe history will see him as a below-average president.” Additionally, “more than half the country (58 percent) say they wish the Bush presidency were simply over.”
Typical of this perspective was the New York Times’ columnist Thomas Friedman: “The American people basically fired George Bush in the last election. We’re now just watching him clean out his desk.”
But not all commentators saw unquestionable decline in Bush’s second term. Richard N. Haass, president of the influential Council on Foreign Relations, argued that the “conventional wisdom [that Bush is a lame duck] is wrong. The president retains the ability to do a great deal, especially in foreign policy.” The National Journal concurred: “The chief executive can direct – and restrict – the flow of intelligence; when the time comes to reveal it, the president and his surrogates have an unrivaled bully pulpit.” And despite Senator Joseph Biden’s evaluation that “Bush is not a lame duck. He’s a dead duck,” retired Army Colonel Lee Van Arsdale saw it differently, especially in the context of foreign policy: “Lame duck is a political term. He’s more like an 800-pound gorilla, and maybe he has a slight limp.”
Strategically and legislatively, 2007 actually turned out to be relatively positive and productive for President Bush after the debacles of 2006, despite falling poll numbers. The view of The Economist, in early 2008, was that: “The “surge” in Iraq proved fairly successful – and vindicated Mr Bush’s decision to back his own judgment against the collective wisdom of the Iraq Study Group. The White House also played a successful defensive game against the Democratic-controlled Congress, out-maneuvering it on everything from Iraq funding to the federal budget to energy bills to wire-tapping.”
Bill Clinton would face the indignity of lame duck questions in his first term, after Republicans won control of the Congress in the 1994 elections. A few months after that defeat, the New York Times announced: “A Wounded President Strives Not to Become a Lame Duck.”
The Chicago Tribune, in November 1997, saw the Clinton Administration entering into: “a period that had caused pundits to use a phrase every president hates to see alongside his name: lame duck.”
The Orlando Sentinel commented in November 1999: “Much is made of the fact that Clinton is struggling to carve out some sort of legacy for himself as his time runs out. It is certainly the case that the inevitable enfeeblement of a second-term, lame-duck president has been made worse by the scandal his reckless adventure with Monica Lewinsky created.” Even the venerable Washington Post journalist David Broder treated the lame duck effect on Clinton as self-evident, in a November 1999 piece entitled: “Clinton’s Not the Only One With Legacy Problems.”
And yet, Clinton was able to pass all kinds of laudable legislation in his last 18 months in office.
The Baltimore Sun offered this view of the administration in June 1999: “Only four months after impeachment apparently left Bill Clinton the lamest of lame ducks, the president stands alone in Washington as the only political leader with real star power and a track record of success that has been burnished by triumph abroad and legislative victories at home. He has prevailed in Kosovo, his most daunting foreign policy challenge; his gun control proposals have captured the public’s support and thrown Congress into chaos…By all accounts, this lame duck is on a roll. “He’s not a lame duck. He is not a dead duck. His wings are not clipped, and the other party is mad about it,” boasted Maryland Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski. Conceded GOP consultant Ed Gillespie: “He’s got a little summer surge going.” “I never really expected Clinton to be limping to the inauguration of the next president,” said Donald Kettl, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin’s LaFollette Institute for Public Affairs.
In April of 1998, the Good Friday Agreement, negotiated with Clinton’s help, was signed in Northern Ireland; and in October of 1998, the Wye River Memorandum, negotiated with Clinton’s help, was signed by Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
So how much leverage is Obama likely to have in the last few years of his administration? According to William Galston, an adviser in the Clinton White House: “It’s close to metaphysically certain that for the Obama administration to get anything done on the legislative front, it will have to swallow compromises, including elements it regards as bad public policy.”
The most promising opportunity could be a treaty on Iran’s nuclear program that the Obama administration could then induce both the Congress of the United States and the Israelis to accept. That would be a foreign policy achievement on the order of Camp David – President Carter’s signature accord between Israel and Egypt.
If Democrats do better than expected in the mid-terms, and hold on to the Senate, they could end up causing fear among Republicans that they need to make some deals or they will do even worse in the 2016 election, (belatedly heeding the lessons of 2012). Immigration reform may yet become a reality. It may also be the case that the president gains renewed leverage from the continuing improvement in the economy.
The so-called lame duck period may not be as limiting as it is often portrayed. History demonstrates that it may, in fact, be a significant period in Barack Obama’s presidency.
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