Ever since the 22nd Amendment limiting presidents to two terms was ratified 56 years ago, second White House terms have labored under lame-duck status. Once a president is by law on his way out, he inevitably loses some of his political clout.
If that second term also encounters serious setbacks, he risks even more being regarded as out of the game. The specter rose the other day for President Bush when a reporter asked whether he thought “you?re losing leverage, and that you?re becoming increasingly irrelevant.”
Bush snapped back, saying that “quite the contrary, I?ve never felt more engaged and more capable of helping [the American] people recognize that there?s a lot of unfinished business. And I?m really looking forward to the next 15 months … to reminding people as to why it?s not getting done.”
He had opened the news conference doing just that. In an obviously planned assault, he ticked off that “Congress has work to do on health care … to keep our people safe … on the budget … on education … on housing … on trade … for our military veterans.” To underscore that he is not irrelevant, he reminded the press of his veto power and his intention to use it ? unlike his behavior in his near-veto-free first term.
Bush?s response to the suggestion of irrelevance was reminiscent of the same charge against President Bill Clinton after the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994, powered by Newt Gingrich?s “Contract With America.” Clinton felt obliged then to tell a news conference that “the president is relevant here.”
He eventually demonstrated his relevance by giving the puffed-up and arrogant new speaker of the House a lesson in the use of presidential power. In a budget fight with Gingrich in late 1995, Clinton vetoed a debt-limit increase, shut down the government, sent 80,000 federal workers home for three weeks and closed national parks and monuments. Gingrich came off as a Grinch, and his so-called revolution was left in tatters.
Clinton, seemingly threatened beforehand with becoming a one-term president, also rehabilitated his political standing with a massive television campaign trumpeting economic progress, and went on to an easy second-term victory in 1996.
But Bush has a very different speaker to deal with now in Nancy Pelosi, who can be just as tough as Gingrich was but manages to soften her equally confrontational style with charm and a radiant smile.
More problematic for this president now is that he is much more encumbered with problems in his own party than Clinton was in his pre-Monica period. One piece of evidence is the number of Republicans who broke with him on the SCHIP children?s health care fight, forcing his veto. It was sustained by other nervous House Republicans by an underwhelming vote.
Also, Bush?s continued dismal level of less than 30 percent support in the polls, and the albatross of the equally unpopular Iraq War that undeniably is his own creation, are burdens of dimensions Clinton didn?t have to bear at the time of his alleged irrelevancy.
Just as important, Bush doesn?t have the time Clinton had to recover from his alleged irrelevance. As Bush noted himself the other day in hisconspicuous argument that “Congress has work to do” on a lot of unfinished business, he has only 15 months left in which to prod it. And for a year of that time, a presidential campaign will be raging with his Republican Party seen as a distinct underdog, with much of the blame laid at his own feet.
Resurrecting the old “Do-Nothing Congress” that worked so well for President Harry Truman in 1948 is a rather negative way to pull Bush?s own political chestnuts out the fire. His strategists may be counting on current polling numbers that indicate voters are just as low on Congress as they are on him.
While the Democrats after eight years in the wilderness on Capitol Hill are now in control again, the thinness of their majority stymies progress and invites the vetoes Bush now threatens at every turn. But their heavy use of congressional oversight has kept him largely on the defensive so far, a situation that surely will continue through what?s left of his lame-duck second term.
Jules Witcover, a Baltimore Examiner columnist, is syndicated by Tribune Media Services. He has covered national affairs from Washington for more than 50 years and is the author of 11 books, and co-author of five others, on American politics and history.
