Obama's last gasp at a legacy: as his potency dwindles, the president should ease up on pot prohibition.

AuthorWelch, Matt
PositionFrom the Top

ALL HOPE AND AUDACITY aside, the math of second-term presidential power is pitiless.

After winning re-election by 3.5 million votes in 2004, George W. Bush declared that "I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it:" Within months, the 43rd president's signature post-election initiative, creating private accounts for Social Security, was declared dead on arrival by the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. In the last Bush midterm election of 2006, energized Democrats re-took control of Congress. So much for second-term capital.

Bill Clinton was impeached halfway through his second term. Richard Nixon resigned in disgrace. Ronald Reagan's Republicans lost control of the Senate in 1986, and the Gipper spent the rest of his presidency backpedaling on a botched arms-for-hostages swap.

The five second-term presidents prior to Reagan--Lyndon Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, Franklin Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson--had it even worse during their midterms, averaging losses of 39 House and seven Senate seats. If President Barack Obama met the same fate in 2014, the Senate would turn Republican and the House would feature its largest GOP majority since 1929.

Though that outcome may seem unlikely now, it is a statistical near-certainty that the pendulum of two-party politics swings decisively away from presidents in years five through eight of their tenure. Americans tire of the bully at the pulpit, same-party congressmen lose their fear of breaking ranks, and the media turns its attention to the next presidential contest.

So it should come as no surprise that, even after winning the popular vote by 5 million and talking up his "mandate," Obama has been so rudely introduced to his own impotence. The first big blow was the March I sequester spending trim, carried out over his howls of protests and predictions of catastrophe. As possibilities for compromise with Republicans floated away, so, too, did dim hopes of a "grand bargain" on long-term entitlement spending.

Thus, the president who came into office in January 2009 vowing that the "hard decisions" on long-term entitlement promises would be "made under my watch, not someone else's," because "we are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick [the can] any further," will instead hand off a ticking entitlement bomb to his successor. Not a happy legacy, that.

Obama also spent the first few months of his second-term political...

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