President Obama, facing his last, best chance to rescue a second term overrun by unending crises and self-inflicted wounds, has hit the reset button on his presidency one final time.
With just two years left in office, Obama has used the humbling defeats of the 2014 midterm elections as license to pursue a newly aggressive strategy to implement a long-stalled domestic agenda. And he has initiated the type of White House shakeup typically sought by a second-term president desperate to brush off notions of irrelevance.
No-drama Obama is now going for broke.
Since Democrats lost control of the Senate, Obama has unveiled executive action to defer the deportation of up to 5 million illegal immigrants, struck a deal with China to limit carbon emissions, once again extended nuclear negations with Iran and forced out Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel.
Rather than quietly embrace lame-duck status, the president no longer appears bound by the same reservations that Democrats complained had fostered an overly cautious governing style. And Obama isn’t much concerned about input from Congress, testing the limits of his executive authority with growing regularity.
For the president’s power play to register, however, he’ll have to convince the public that this pivot is different from the array of self-professed fresh starts that did little to prevent souring perceptions of his White House tenure.
And even Obama’s allies wonder whether he is doomed to suffer through a final two years not all that different from the rest of his beleaguered second term.
“It’s about time — where has this guy been?” one House Democratic lawmaker told the Washington Examiner of the latest iteration of Obama. “It’s a beautiful thing to see, even if it’s too late. Am I predicting some miraculous comeback? No, I’m realistic. But this is obviously the best hand he has left to play.”
Perhaps the clearest signal of a course correction in the wake of the midterms was Obama’s decision to let go of Hagel, a Pentagon chief tapped to limit the nation’s military footprint at a time of chronic tumult overseas.
Much like President George W. Bush, who dismissed Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in year six of a presidency on a clear downward trajectory, Obama is banking that a major shakeup will reinvigorate a national security team increasingly on the defensive.
Still, some analysts said Obama’s move lacks the clear benefit of Bush’s.
“I think Obama will get less mileage than Bush got out of firing Rumsfeld,” said Jeremy Mayer, a political scientist at George Mason University. “Rumsfeld was associated with policy changes Bush was making in Iraq. What policy is Hagel associated with? Hagel is not strong in the public mind. He’s not a dramatic secretary of defense.”
More dramatic was Obama’s choice to move forward with executive action on protecting millions of illegal immigrants, tossing aside midterm election results as irrelevant in his quest to overhaul the immigration system to an extent not seen in decades.
“It is not the politics of trying to get the job done, it’s the politics of trying to run roughshod over Congress and the Constitution,” complained former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour. “They think violating the Constitution is a matter of process.”
Not tackling immigration reform earlier, Obama admitted, was his greatest regret since taking office. Now the president is banking that a progressive base that largely sat out the 2014 midterms will rally to his side and ultimately turn out for whomever wins the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries.
On a broader level, the immigration move is an obvious legacy play. And Obama has calculated that he’ll weather showdowns with Republicans over the scope of his executive powers and emerge stronger in the eyes of history for taking such actions.
Republicans contend that such thinking is not rooted in reality.
“I’m not sure they did the math right,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, director of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisers, of the Obama White House’s calculus. “The executive action has nothing in it for the business community. There are just as many people who are here legally who are upset by his move. He couldn’t do through executive action the things achieved only through legislation. That’s not exactly a victory.”
