Dangers in Obama's second term

Frank Wilson is a retired Inquirer book editor

As usual, after an election, the punditocracy has been delivering itself of the usual prophesies of doom (if its side lost) and salvation (if its won). So we have been hearing a good deal about the emergent liberal majority on the one hand and the imminent death of the Republican Party on the other.

Time for everyone to pause and take a deep breath.

"Predicting is difficult," physicist Niels Bohr once said, "especially the future."

Vintage individuals, such as myself, still recall Democrats' hallelujahs upon the election of Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 - Johnson garnered the biggest percentage of the popular vote in history - as well as the corresponding weeping and gnashing of teeth among Republicans at the time.

Well, we all know how that turned out. In a couple of years, the heady days of the Great Society had given way to mobs of demonstrators shouting, "Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?" In the meantime, the GOP had picked a guy from Ohio named Ray Bliss as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Starting at the grassroots, Bliss got the GOP back on track to win the 1968 presidential election for Richard M. Nixon, who then went on to win reelection four years later by the third largest popular vote in history. A couple of years later, Nixon became the first president to resign from office.

Then there was Ronald Reagan. He won by a landslide two times in a row. But his second term wasn't anywhere near the triumph of the first, what with the Iran-Contra scandal.

Reagan's vice president, George H.W. Bush, won the 1988 election against a dorky Michael S. Dukakis, and Bush One went on to notch the third-highest approval rating ever recorded, on July 31, 1992. Just over three months later, he was voted out of office.

Which brings us to Bill Clinton. He may be popular now, but let us not forget that he never won a majority of the popular vote, either in 1992 (43.01 percent) or 1996 (49.23 percent). George W. Bush only won a majority of the vote in 2004 (50.73 percent).

Since Abraham Lincoln, every president who has won a second term has won it by a larger margin than he did his first term - except Grover Cleveland, the only president to have had two non-successive terms, and . . . Barack Obama, who won this year's election with 50.4 percent of the vote, down by 2.4 percent from his election in 2008.

Note that second terms have a tendency to be more problematic than first terms. Nixon didn't finish his, Reagan had to deal with Iran-Contra, and Clinton was impeached.

Time for another deep breath.

Obama's first term was, by any rational measure, among the most lackluster ever. When he took office in January 2009, the unemployment rate was 7.6 percent. He pushed through a stimulus bill, arguing that if it were not passed, unemployment would reach 10 percent, and adding that if it did pass, the unemployment rate would be down to 5.6 percent in September of this year. Well, the stimulus bill passed, the unemployment rate hit 10 percent anyway in 2010, and was only down to 7.8 in September, slightly above what it was when he took office. It is now slightly up again, and, if you include those who have stopped looking for work, is even higher. (Last week, unemployment claims were reported to have risen sharply; inflation and the poverty rate rose, too.)

Meanwhile, GDP growth is a distinctly mediocre 2 percent. And even if you give some the blame for the $1.4 trillion deficit in 2009 to George W. Bush, only Obama is responsible for the $1 trillion-plus deficits in 2010, 2011, and 2012. (It is worth noting that, according to the Treasury Department, of the $245 billion it disbursed under the Troubled Relief Asset Program (TARP) that was passed in the final months of the Bush administration, 99 percent had been paid back as of last year.)

Then, there's foreign policy. The war in Iraq ended exactly in accordance with the timetable set by the Bush administration. Obama escalated the war in Afghanistan, which seems to be going nowhere fast. In the meantime, Obama has deployed six times the number of drone strikes as his predecessor did, with noticeably less success: About a third of Bush's drone strikes took out a terrorist leader; only 13 percent of Obama's have. According to an article in Britain's Guardian newspaper, of Obama's 283 strikes in Pakistan, between 1,494 and 2,618 people have been killed, mostly civilians. Of course, he did give the order to kill Osama bin Laden. Otherwise, it's a good thing he's not a Republican, or the media and peace advocates everywhere would be in an uproar.

Finally, there's Benghazi. The president may have managed to evade questions on Libya during the campaign, but they are not about to go away anytime soon. If anything assures that, it is the burgeoning scandal surrounding the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus and the revelation that he visited Benghazi shortly after the attack there.

Despite all this, the American electorate, in its wisdom, chose to give the guy four more years. Well, he may just be about to discover the truth in the adage about getting what you wish for.

You may be able to blame the problems confronting your first administration on what you inherited from the previous administration. But the mandate Obama has now is to demonstrate that what he started only needed more time to come to a satisfactory close. After all, the basic message of his campaign was "let us finish what we've started."

Good luck.