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Friday, June 3, 2024
By Steven L. Taylor

Via the CSM comes an interesting piece on the second Bush term: Bush’s Term II: a slow road

Just seven months after the election results rolled in, some Washington cognoscenti are already wondering if President Bush has fallen into the second-term trap – overreaching and winding up with a fistful of air.

Understanding the nature of the timeline for a second term, it still strikes me that seven months is too soon to be measuring success or failure.

It is certainly true that the major projects remain undone, with some successes:

When asked at this week’s press conference whether he was losing momentum, he replied first with some successes – bankruptcy legislation, class-action lawsuit reform, and the long-delayed confirmation of a federal judge. But the bulk of his answer focused on initiatives that are stalled in Congress – energy legislation, Central American free trade, and Social Security.

Of course, if Bush had managed to get all of that plus the energy bill, CAFTA and SS reform in seven months, he would going down in history as one of the greatest presidents of all time, legislation-wise.

And I found this interesing, only because Greenstein is one of the deans of presidential studies:

Ultimately, say presidential scholars, no one should count Bush out. He is a seasoned political operator, going back to his father’s presidency, and it is clear from the way he speaks that he knows how Washington works. On Social Security, he has not repeated President Clinton’s fatal error of laying down an ultimatum on healthcare reform. And Bush says he won’t put forth draft legislation on Social Security, because “the first bill on the Hill is always dead on arrival.” He has left himself wiggle room for a deal.

“I would be astonished if something does not emerge from the Hill on Social Security which he declares success on,” says Fred Greenstein, an emeritus professor of political science at Princeton University. It may not contain precisely the kind of personal accounts that he wants, Dr. Greenstein surmises, but given Bush’s longstanding personal devotion to the concept, it will probably have “some token in the direction of private accounts.”

Update: James Joyner comments on a thematically-related LAT op/ed.

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