"Today, we actually signed a bill," Obama declared to laughter at a Seattle fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee last week.
Even his request for emergency funding to deal with the influx of children from Central America is stalled on Capitol Hill. The White House has shelved the idea of legislation to overhaul the immigration system, once hoped to be a centerpiece of his second term. forces from Afghanistan by the end of this year.Īnd at home, enacting any sort of major legislation over the next two and a half years is hard to imagine. In Iraq, insurgents have scored unexpected territorial gains, a development that could affect the administration's calculations about the planned withdrawal of U.S. "The world doesn't stop spinning."įor Obama, the world has become a dramatically more problematic place in recent weeks, from the Israeli pounding of Palestinians in Gaza to Russia's role in the shootdown of a Malaysian jetliner over Ukraine. "That sort of motivation for the press is removed."īut during second terms, as with first ones, "you need to be focused on the opportunities and prepared for whatever problems are going to be coming your way," she says. "A lot of the press around the first term is focused on what whatever action the president is taking will mean for his or her ability to have a second term," she said. White House Communications Director Jennifer Palmieri acknowledges it has gotten harder to command the attention of the news media. Bush's second term, she saw that administration face growing resistance in Congress and have to battle for attention as the political world turned to the next presidential election - but not, she says, as early as Obama has had to deal with those complications. As White House political director during George W. "He's a lame duck and it's not even lame-duck time," says Sara Fagen, who knows the territory. Now even those circumscribed ambitions have been overshadowed by crises overseas that are demanding his attention and buffeting his presidency.
In his State of the Union address, delivered precisely six months ago Monday, Obama outlined a scaled-down agenda for his sixth year in office, acknowledging the difficulty of passing legislation in a gridlocked Congress and vowing to use "the pen and the phone" to get things done. WASHINGTON - The woes of a second term are nothing new, but for President Obama they seem to have started sooner and struck harder than for his predecessors.
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