"Conservatives may take delight in seeing this president hobbled, but the same happened to George W. Bush when his partial privatization of Social Security failed early in his second term and Hurricane Katrina cemented his lame-duck status. Then, the liberals were cheering the chief executive’s impotence and howling about his use of executive orders. Having a crippled presidency for three years isn’t good for the country — regardless of who’s in charge.
Certainly, many second-term woes have been less about lame-duck status than about hubris, complacency and first-term mistakes catching up with presidents. But when a presidency has a constitutional expiration date, it increases the opposition’s incentive to stall. No wonder modern second terms have been almost uniformly unsuccessful.
Dwight Eisenhower’s average approval rating of 69.6 percent in his first term went to 60.5 percent in his second, according to Gallup. Lyndon Johnson (though he could have run again in 1968) saw his 74.2 percent approval in his first term fall to 50.3 percent in his Vietnam-plagued second term. Watergate-wounded Richard Nixon went from 55.8 percent to 34.4 percent . Bush’s approval level of 62.2 percent in his first term fell to 36.5 percent in his second . Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton defied the pattern because of good economic times, but their second terms were dominated, respectively, by Iran-contra and impeachment.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/dana-milbank-america-doesnt-need-a-lame-duck-president/2014/01/30/110c90ac-8a04-11e3-916e-e01534b1e132_story.html
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