The Second Term: What would Obama do if reelected?

In November, 1984, President
Ronald Reagan was reëlected in a landslide victory over Walter Mondale,
taking forty-nine states and fifty-nine per cent of the popular vote.
The Reagan revolution was powerfully reaffirmed. Soon after, Donald
Regan, the new chief of staff, sent word to a small group of trusted
friends and Administration officials seeking advice on how Reagan should
approach his last four years in office. It was an unusual moment in the
history of the Presidency, and the experience of recent incumbents
offered no guidance. No President since Dwight D. Eisenhower had served
two full terms. John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Lyndon Johnson,
overwhelmed by the war in Vietnam, had declined to run for reëlection in
1968. Richard Nixon resigned less than seventeen months into his second
term. Gerald Ford (who was never elected) and Jimmy Carter were
defeated. By the nineteen-eighties, it had become popular to talk about
the crisis of the Presidency; a bipartisan group of Washington leaders,
with Carter’s support, launched the National Committee for a Single
Six-Year Presidential Term.

Regan’s effort to foresee a successful
second term is documented in a series of memos at the Reagan Library.
President Obama, who in November could face one of the tightest bids for
reëlection in history, has periodically spoken of his admiration for
Reagan. “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory for America,” he told a
Reno, Nevada, newspaper in early 2008. “He just tapped into what people
were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism.” From
the inception of his Presidential bid, Obama has sought to present
himself as a leader with far-reaching ideas, and has prided himself on
his ability to look past the politics of the moment. To the degree that
he is able to ponder his strategy for the next four years, it’s natural
to think he might steal a glance at the Reagan playbook. Responding to
Regan’s confidential memo, Tom Korologos, an adviser to every Republican
President from Nixon to George W. Bush, told the Reagan White House
that the second term should be viewed from the standpoint of the
President’s intended legacy.

“It seems to me that the President
needs to decide what his legacy is going to be,” Korologos wrote on
January 24, 1985, a few days after Reagan’s second inaugural. “What is
he going to be the most proud of when he’s sitting at the ranch with
Nancy four and five years after his Presidency? Is it going to be an
arms control agreement? Is it going to be a balanced budget? Is it going
to be world-wide economic recovery? Is it going to be a combination of
all of this: peace and prosperity? . . . Every speech; every appearance;
every foreign trip; every congressional phone call and every act
involving the President should be made with the long-range goal in
mind.”

Every President running for reëlection begins to think
about his second term well before victory is assured. In early 2009,
Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s first chief of staff, told me that the White House
was already contemplating the Presidency in terms of eight years. He
said that it was folly to try to accomplish everything in the first
term. “I don’t buy into everybody’s theory about the final years of a
Presidency,” Emanuel said. “There’s an accepted wisdom that in the final
years you’re kind of done. Ronald Reagan, in the final years, got arms
control, immigration reform, and created a separate new department,”
that of Veterans Affairs.

Obama’s
campaign is well aware that he may end up like Jimmy Carter or George
H. W. Bush, the two most recent one-term Presidents, who were both
defeated despite some notable—even historic—accomplishments, including
the Camp David Accords, under Carter, and the Gulf War, under Bush. The
country remains closely divided, and the economy is teetering again.
After several months of relatively positive news, the employment report
released in June was gloomy. Barring a disastrous revelation or blunder,
Mitt Romney will be a more formidable opponent than many assumed during
his rightward lurch to secure the Republican nomination.

Many
White House officials were reluctant to discuss a second term; they are
focussed more on the campaign than on what comes after. But the
ostensible purpose of a political campaign is to articulate for the
public what a candidate will do if he prevails. “It’s a tension,” David
Axelrod, Obama’s longtime political adviser, said. “On the one hand, you
don’t want to be presumptuous in assuming a second term. But campaigns
are about the future, and there is an imperative to spell out where
we’re going.”

Obama has an ambitious second-term agenda, which, at
least in broad ways, his campaign is beginning to highlight. The
President has said that the most important policy he could address in
his second term is climate change, one of the few issues that he thinks
could fundamentally improve the world decades from now. He also is
concerned with containing nuclear proliferation. In April, 2009, in one
of the most notable speeches of his Presidency, he said, in Prague, “I
state clearly and with conviction America’s commitment to seek the peace
and security of a world without nuclear weapons.” He conceded that the
goal might not be achieved in his lifetime but promised to take
“concrete steps,” including a new treaty with Russia to reduce nuclear
weapons and ratification of the 1996 Comprehensive Nuclear Test-Ban
Treaty.

In 2010, Obama negotiated a new Strategic Arms Reduction
Treaty with the Russians and won its passage in the Senate. But, despite
his promise to “immediately and aggressively” ratify the C.N.T.B.T., he
never submitted it for ratification. As James Mann writes in “The
Obamians,” his forthcoming book on Obama’s foreign policy, “The Obama
administration crouched, unwilling to risk controversy and a Senate
fight for a cause that the President, in his Prague speech, had endorsed
and had promised to push quickly and vigorously.” As with climate
change, Obama’s early rhetoric and idealism met the reality of
Washington politics and his reluctance to confront Congress.