Worth Clicking: Has Bill Clinton lost his touch or is he playing a more devious game?

June 11, 2012

What Would Obama Do in a Second Term?

Ryan Lizza: "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... Many White House officials were reluctant to discuss a second term; they are focused 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."

Said David Axelrod: "It's a tension. 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."