WHITE HOUSE WATCH
Term Limits
by Ryan Lizza Post date: 06.20.05
Issue date: 06.27.05
For a president who began his second term famously promising to spend political capital, George W. Bush is looking increasingly bankrupt. Everyone knows the scorecard. Social Security reform is in a ditch. John Bolton's nomination is stuck. Democrats have nixed several of the president's judges. And there's little relief on the horizon. The remainder of Bush's legislative agenda is simultaneously difficult to pass and unpopular. The Central American Free Trade Agreement, asbestos legislation, and the energy bill may play well on Wall Street, but no one on Main Street is clamoring for their passage. Even if enacted, along with the new pro-credit card company bankruptcy law and the new restrictions on class-action lawsuits, they would only reinforce the perception that Republicans have done little more this year than successfully reward the corporate wing of their coalition. Adding to Bush's woes, perhaps the single most popular piece of legislation that has any chance of landing on his desk this year is a bill to lift restrictions on stem-cell research. He has promised to veto it.
Accompanying these setbacks, Bush's job approval ratings have dropped into the mid-40s, a sudden loss of confidence that no second-term president has experienced since Richard Nixon. Bill Clinton's approval rating never dropped below 53 percent during his troubled second term-- impeachment notwithstanding--and, for most of those years, Clinton enjoyed support in the 60s. Ronald Reagan remained in the 60s through the first two years of his second term and saw Bush-like ratings only after Iran-Contra broke. That Bush's political health is in sharp decline is indisputable. But the causes of this deterioration have been misdiagnosed.
There are several reasons often cited for why Bush has descended from the heights of a reelection in which he increased his vote total by nearly twelve million--and became the first presidential candidate in twelve years to break 50 percent--to become the hobbled figure he is today. For one, traditional divisions in the Republican Party are starting to resurface after years of détente. Through two presidential campaigns, the desire to win back the White House--and then the fear of losing it again--was enough to achieve harmony between social and economic conservatives. These tacit agreements always break down in second terms. Social conservatives argued after the election that they provided Bush's margin of victory, yet Bush's agenda was filled with sops to business. As in the Terri Schiavo and stem-cell cases, Bush will be under constant pressure to throw high-profile bones to social conservatives, and, in so doing, he will risk offending much of the rest of America.
Secondly, with no obvious successor, others point out that Bush's second term is becoming increasingly complicated by the politics of the Republican presidential primaries. About half a dozen Senate Republicans plan on running for president, and any issue Bush pursues may become hostage to their ambitions, just as the nuclear option turned into a test of leadership between Bill Frist and John McCain. With Bush safely elected, even members who aren't gunning for his job feel they have a freer hand. For example, Senator John Thune says he will vote against Bolton--an unthinkable act for a conservative Republican in Bush's first term--while House Republicans recently allowed an embarrassing (for Bush) vote on the stem-cell bill.
Finally, many point out that the unified Democratic opposition to Bush's Social Security plan, as well as the guerrilla campaign against Bush's most polarizing nominees, are bedeviling the administration.
All of these conventional reasons for Bush's troubles are no doubt contributing to the early onset of lame duckitis and the accompanying blizzard of articles describing it. But the most important explanation for Bush's problems is what might be called his bait and switch. Bush campaigned in 2004 on one set of ideas, but he is pursuing a radically different agenda. His program has been inverted. The issues he talked about the most last year, such as terrorism, are off the radar, while those he rarely highlighted are front and center.
Social Security was a peripheral issue in the 2004 campaign, buried in a laundry list of proposals in Bush's speeches. The Bush campaign spent millions of dollars buying commercials, yet somehow never devoted an ad to the issue that Bush now spends the majority of his time talking about. Bush ran on security, not Social Security. In the campaign, Bush presented the choice to voters as a contest over who could be leader of the war on terrorism. The limits of that conceit are now being laid bare. The massive campaign communications apparatus--the commercials, speeches, surrogates, debates, and 24-hour news coverage--that helped build him up as a steady leader in dangerous times has now vanished. Instead, Bush is seen most often on television as a traveling salesman hawking an unpopular idea in jargon-laden phrases. He ran as a slayer of terrorists but now spends all his time explaining progressive indexation.
In other words, Bush's problem is one of expectations--ironically, the political thermostat that he and his team have always been most adept at strategically adjusting. Bush's mistake is (literally) a textbook example of why second terms are often failures. In his influential book The Personal President: Power Invested, Promise Unfilled, released just as Ronald Reagan was settling in for his second term, political scientist Theodore Lowi argued that the final years of any modern presidency are doomed to failure. His argument, written in the wake of the disappointing presidencies of Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter, was that the rise of the president as the central figure in U.S. political life had created expectations of what the president could accomplish that are wildly out of sync with the actual powers of the job. The result is a continually frustrated public. He argued that every failure only created more frantic p.r. attempts by the president to be seen as successful, often creating incentives for "adventurism abroad." "As visibility goes up," Lowi once told The Atlantic, "so do expectations and vulnerability. There's more of a chance to make really big mistakes. It's a treadmill to oblivion. It's why modern history is filled with so many failed presidencies."
Though they obviously fared better than their one-term predecessors, Lowi's argument proved fairly powerful in describing Reagan's and Clinton's second terms. Reagan's magisterial 49-state victory over Walter Mondale did not seem to predict the bumbling start he had in 1985, which was marked by his inability to budge Congress and the furor over the wreath-laying ceremony at the German cemetery at Bitburg, where 49 S.S. soldiers were buried. In his biography of Reagan, Lou Cannon notes that the disconnect between the Reagan of the uplifting "Morning in America" campaign ("the masterful leader depicted in the reelection propaganda of 1984") and the Reagan back on the job after the election ("[t]he floundering and illinformed president whom the American people were allowed to glimpse in 1985") was at the root of the president's problems. As Lowi might have predicted, suffering from defeats and desperate to satisfy the public's yearning to bring home the hostages held in Lebanon, Reagan authorized the deal that led to Iran-Contra, the disclosure of which swallowed most of the last two years of his presidency.
The high public expectations that accompanied Clinton's landslide victory also preceded the traditional second-term curse. The year following Clinton's January 1997 second inaugural was marked by fund-raising scandals and the Supreme Court decision affirming Paula Jones's right to sue the president. The fallout from that lawsuit, of course, consumed most of the rest of Clinton's presidency. But there was an odd twist to Lowi's theory in Clinton's second term. The lack of accomplishments on Clinton's watch in the late '90s came to be blamed more on Congress than the president, who spent most of his final term popular even though he was (legislatively) impotent.
To be sure, both Reagan and Clinton had some big successes in their last four years--tax reform and Reykjavik for Reagan, the balanced budget deal and Kosovo for Clinton. (Incidentally, what those rare second-term achievements have in common is that they were broadly popular and achieved with bipartisan support.) But the main point is that the obvious danger zone for any second-term president is the first year after reelection, when transitioning from the peak of victory. That's when it's easiest to notice the divide between how the president campaigned and how he governs. For Bush, the divide has always been wide, but it has never been so obvious.
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