What is the meaning of this presidency?
Some words from Charles Cook: At this point in their second terms, the Gallup poll showed President Eisenhower with a 58 percent approval rating, President Reagan was at 65 percent and President Clinton at 61 percent. President Nixon, shadowed by Watergate disclosures that would eventually force him to resign, was at 31 percent.
Indeed, in the entirety of their second terms, Eisenhower never dropped below 48 percent, Reagan never got below 43 percent and Clinton never dipped below 54 percent in Gallup polling. Clearly, we don’t have much experience with second-term presidents facing these kinds of numbers. There is no textbook telling someone in the position Bush finds himself in how to battle back and find success pushing his legislative agenda on Capitol Hill.
It has become a little too easy and has become a bit too easy a Conventional Wisdom cliche to say that Second Terms are Hell on the President. The reality is that — second terms can be quite successful. Reagan defeated Communism, right? Clinton continued his period of Economic Prosperity, and passed through his negligible minor-key agenda (he fancied himself the second coming of Rutherford Hayes and Grover Cleveland, you see…). (Matthew Yglesias has a way to consider the Clinton Presidency, and what he accomplished when.) Are these not “successes”?
But today… we are in some mighty bizarre political waters here. Bush’s push-back strategy at the moment, to attack the Democrats for voting for his Iraq War Resolution in the first place… a conceit that makes me wonder why in 2002 he wasn’t out there campaigning on behalf of Senators Max Cleland, Mary Landrieu, Tim Johnson, and Jean Carnahan for their, (ahem) “Clear Eyed Realism”. (Yesterday, the Republican Party rebuked Bush on the Iraq War … sort of kind of… by stripping the Democratic Party bill to demand a timeline from Bush of any meaning and passing something of the sort. A cruious sign of how the political climate has changed drastically.)
Do I choose to believe the rumours emitting from The Washington Times. I’d become accustomed to these stories from the spurious website “Capital Hill Blues”. Now we have received them from a right-wing source… a Pravda. To read The Washington Times is an exercise in Sovietology, and I do not know what to make of this story. Oedipal or Nixon… Nixon or Oedipal? Can things really be falling apart like that? And why am I not feeling any schaudenfruede?
There oughta be a law. A president who cannot muster an approval rating over 40 percent for a month’s duration shall be removed. He shall be replaced by a member of the same party who has successfully positioned himself apart from the president. (The second part of this law will help clear up a wee bit the Woeful state of the Senate — where a party wraps themselves tightly around their man in the White House, Legislature becoming Parliament, political Independence Lost for fear of how a weakened Party figurehead will tear your political fortunes down. In the current climate… may I suggest Chuck Hagel (Soitenly not goddamned John McCain.) I’ll work out the mechinations of this new rule later.