MEET OUR ROUNDTABLE PARTICIPANTS
Lori Zakel, a professor of communications at Sinclair Community College, Dayton.
S. Charles Funderburk, a professor of political science, Wright State University, Fairborn.
Mel Cohen, a professor of political science, Miami University Middletown.
Daniel R. Birdsong, a political science lecturer, University of Dayton.
Thomas T. Taylor, history professor, Wittenberg University, Springfield.
Stanley Earley, Dayton deputy city manager.
Moderators: Michael Williams, Ron Rollins.
Things haven’t quite been going President Obama’s way since his second inauguration, as a series of controversial events — scandals, according to his opponents — have piled upon the White House: fallout from the Benghazi attack, the IRS scrutiny of conservative groups and the debate over government surveillance of phone records. We decided to gather a group of local people who specialize in policy, history and the study of political science to talk about how recent events may affect the rest of Obama’s administration, and also about presidential legacies in general. While we selected this group for their professional expertise, they weren’t speaking for their places of employment. What follows is our very interesting conversation, edited and condensed.
Moderator: There’s been a lot written about President Obama’s recent problems, and it’s been said that presidents often seem to have either scandals or big problems in their second terms. Do you think this is a real phenomenon? Is there a second-term curse?
Stanley Earley: It's a matter of perception, and I would say no. Statistically, presidents have lower approval ratings in their second terms, but it also depends on what you choose to look at. Even in Bill Clinton's case, you had the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but at the same time we had the federal budget go to positive for the first time in decades, the economy was good, we had major reforms in welfare and so forth. It's hard to judge this term after a few months.
Daniel Birdsong: It's difficult to say in a broad sense because, since World War II, how many presidents have been re-elected? You do have the scandals — Monica with Clinton, Iran-Contra with Ronald Reagan, Watergate. Reagan and Richard Nixon were hurt quite a bit in the polls but, for some reason, Clinton was able to maintain his approval rating as president despite the Lewinsky scandal. People just saw him differently as a person. Right now, it's unclear where the polls are going with Obama. There hasn't been a steep drop for him. I'd agree with Stan that it's hard to say there's a definite second-term curse.
Mel Cohen: If I had to choose, I would rather be a first-term president than a second-term president. By the time your second term comes around, you're getting opposition from lots of different areas that has built over time. Obama has problems not just from the right, but from the left, as well.
Lori Zakel: I love the idea of one six-year term. So much of the first term is focused on re-election, and then in the second term, since you're not running again, the communication and the outcomes are different.
S. Charles Funderburk: A lot of Obama's problems started with the midterm election in 2010, when Democrats lost 63 seats in the House, which is a lot. So since 2010, he's had no chance of working with the Republican House. Combine that with ideological polarization and conservatives' huge personal animosity toward Clinton and Obama, to get as much done as he has — the stimulus, health care — in his first two years is actually pretty impressive. But usually, presidents end up working with a less-friendly Congress after midterm elections, and that takes the starch out of you. It's not so much a second-term curse as a kind of downhill momentum that starts in the middle of the first term.
Thomas Taylor: A second term only sounds good until you're elected the second time. The first time you run, the base and the party react to your high-minded, intellectual rhetoric. When you're re-elected, the party is looking for who's going to help them win next time. Since there won't be a third term, there's no need to work for you. Plus, the other side has been out of power for four years, so everything they hate about you really comes out.
Cohen: Well, all that doesn't mean I don't want a second term. In this case, Obama had his first-term initiatives, but a lot of the implementation of them happens in the second term — the Affordable Care Act, removal of troops from Afghanistan. It may be a tough second term, but he's still cementing his presidency — especially if a Democrat is elected the next time.
Taylor: Although the track record of getting your vice president elected after you isn't very good.
Earley: The six-year term is intriguing.
Funderburk: I tend to be in sympathy with the idea that the best democratic system is parliamentary, where the party leader of the majority party is the nation's leader. With a single six-year term, you can be guaranteed the president would pull out all the stops, but they'd also be an instant lame duck.
Moderator: Did George W. Bush have a second-term problem?
Birdsong: He was in decline already. Katrina knocked the bottom out. His approval rating dropped when he was trying to sell Social Security reform.
Funderburk: His credibility and support were already crumbling because of the Iraq war — another of those Vietnam-quagmire deals.
Zakel: And yet, the war helped him get re-elected, too.
Birdsong: Right, he was able to run as a war president.
Cohen: The war hadn't started turning so visibly bad yet.
Funderburk: Still, Kerry gave him a run. At that stage in a war, though, the president is going to get support. But the fact that Bush put a moratorium on the media visually covering the caskets of the dead soldiers coming home means he knew at that point how it was going to go.
Earley: His approval rating at the end was the lowest of any post-World War II president except Nixon.
Taylor: And both his and Obama's presidencies ended up being dominated by things they didn't run on — each was confronted with an enormous crisis once he was elected that had nothing to do with the themes of their campaigns.
Funderburk: It's always about the timing. If the Great Recession had happened in 2007, Bush would have been Herbert Hoover — not a war president, but a depression president.
Earley: It's the job, and events, and the world that defines you. The world is big and powerful and comes at you in different ways. You can totally get run over by things you never dreamed of.
Moderator: The word that gets tossed around a lot to describe Obama’s problems is “scandal.” Are these actually scandals? Let’s start with the IRS situation.
Funderburk: Well, there are scandals and then there are White House scandals. Try as they may, I don't think the Republicans are going to manage to drag that dead dog to his front porch.
Zakel: They'll die trying, though.
Funderburk: The IRS stepped in it, sure, but they do have the legal right to look at those groups. Maybe just not in that fashion. It remains to be seen.
Earley: But the legal structure of 501(c)4s and what they can do, and the changes in rules around contributions, are what set that event in motion. Some things are just driven by bad law, or poorly thought-out law.
Funderburk: Or bad Supreme Court decisions, like Citizens United.
Taylor: But the national debate on this is not characterized by attention to details or subtlety. You might view why an IRS employee looked at a certain group differently, if you understood the law and the issues.
Zakel: But depending on my political views, I don't need to do that. I can choose to hear just my side of things, whatever it is, whenever I turn on the TV or go online. That's affected all aspects of our conversations these days, and made it too easy not to engage in intelligent discussion or critical thinking.
Birdsong: Republicans are paying more attention to the scandals than Democrats or independents are, polls bear that out.
Moderator: Well, in today’s media environment, would Watergate have played out differently?
Funderburk: You mean, if there had been something like Fox News that could have been there to defend the president? That's interesting.
Birdsong: I don't know. … Surely, the change in media today means there are more voices that can distract from, or explain, the behavior. But I think some things may supersede partisanship and ideology, and when you have a clearly criminal act, that tends to tone down the rhetoric. That might be why Clinton wasn't hurt as much by his scandal. But Watergate was different in scope because of the level of its criminality.
Cohen: Sometimes, facts do make a difference.
Zakel: Nice to know.
Taylor: But really, Watergate was the first TV scandal. It was covered all day long, and the hearings were replayed at night. Compare it to, say, Kennedy's affairs, which were easy to keep quiet.
Moderator: Is Benghazi a scandal?
Taylor: There are always two layers to these scandal arguments. There's what happened, however bad or serious it may be, and then there is what it tells us about the people in power. Both of those are what the right is saying about these. If you already think the IRS is inherently corrupt, it's easy to see scandal. If you think this administration is one that never really got its act together, then Benghazi falls into that. Really, though, you'd think that none of what happened was the fault of the actual bad guys who attacked us. They don't even get mentioned in all this.
Funderburk: Why is so it so hard for politicians and administrations to resist the temptation to shout out a quick sound bite? What's wrong with saying you want more facts before you make a big, sweeping statement on something? In this case, the minute they found out that rocket-propelled grenades were used, they would've known it wasn't just an angry crowd. This was a terrorist act, just admit it. If they hadn't rushed to judgment, they wouldn't be in the fix they're in.
Taylor: Is that a result of the professionalism of the White House communications office?
Zakel: Absolutely. It's strategic communication, the pressing need to get the message out that you want as quickly as possible.
Birdsong: But there's a risk in coming out and saying you don't know yet, because then you can look weak — it makes an opening where the other side can say: Who's at the helm? Who's the leader?
Moderator: Do you think they really did not know, or were trying to manage the story?
Funderburk: If they knew, then they made a terrible misjudgment.
Earley: But there was all kinds of information coming in, and a lot of it would have been inaccurate. Maybe they could've handled it better, but those first couple of days were very confusing.
Taylor: And there's no graciousness in the conversation. Everything becomes the worst possible explanation.
Cohen: And everything becomes a campaign issue. The day it occurred, the Republicans were on the TV talk shows right away, while the diplomats were saying, wait and see. I was appalled. In foreign policy, historically, both sides work together — but not this time. It's really sad. It's a tragedy what happened to those people. Today's technology is what drives us wanting and demanding quick responses. The government wasn't designed that way. It makes you wonder, was the Constitution designed to deal with today's events?
Moderator: OK, the NSA surveillance issue.
Funderburk: Somehow, I don't think Obama's the only president who's done this.
Birdsong: It's ironic, that if it's tied to terrorism, the majority will find it acceptable. What's interesting is the partisanship. In 2006, Republicans were for it; now they're against it.
Earley: I can't understand why people are surprised. This has been the norm for some time, and we had all those big debates about the Patriot Act in 2006. I thought this was settled policy, a settled question.
Birdsong: Nobody was paying attention in the first place to an actual policy debate.
Funderburk: The administration wouldn't want to be on the other side of this if something else blows up and then we weren't listening to phone calls. You can't ignore patterns flowing back and forth, and if you see a hot spot, you have to pay attention to that.
Cohen: The scandal is (Edward) Snowden and how he got hired. How he was screened and what protections they have in the system.
Birdsong: He's a hero, to some people.
Moderator: So, have there been any successful second terms?
Cohen: Lincoln won the Civil War. …
Taylor: No, it was won by the time he was re-elected.
Birdsong: Clinton and Reagan fared really well in the polls. Eisenhower did OK. But there aren't that many two-termers.
Taylor: And what is the criteria for success? They didn't have approval ratings for George Washington.
Cohen: It's about the legacy. What people will look back at later and think mattered. It's about the looking back and seeing what remains of what that person tried to implement. You may not know for 10 years or more.
Taylor: Sometimes the success in the second term is international — the old saw that presidents tend to look outward after they're re-elected. Reagan's better relationship with Gorbachev couldn't have happened in his first term, for example. By the second term, world leaders know you better, and it's easier to establish those ongoing relationships — and they matter. Sometimes you can do real good.
Cohen: You know, I'm not sure that it's easier with foreign policy — the world is not an easy place. This is a pretty complex time, and it's a changing world.
Taylor: Dealing with public policy questions in general is not simple. The president has to manage things that are enormously complex — asking, is this good for the country? For the whole planet? And we get caught up in these two- and four-year terms. … Well, since FDR, we tend to judge presidential success by legislative success — that he's successful if he gets his legislative agenda passed. You should be able to have a fine presidency, really, without passing a lot of laws, but we are now disinclined to accept that. For the first half of American history, people didn't think the president had to get a lot of things through Congress.
Birdsong: Presidents then also weren't running in a popular primary to get re-elected. That's a modern change. Plus, presidents now need to be on social media to be effective communicators, whatever that means.
Taylor: Can you imagine the Lincoln-Douglas debates on Twitter?
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