Recent events suggest that the 44th president may not be immune to the phenomenon that historians call the "second-term curse."
Not four months after his ambitious inaugural address, President Obama finds himself struggling to move his legislative agenda through an unbudging Congress.
Bad, bad Congress! Who put you there, anyway?
And over the past week, two flaring controversies -- one over his administration's handling of the killing of the U.S. ambassador and three other Americans in Libya, the other over Internal Revenue Service employees targeting tea party groups for special scrutiny -- have dominated the discussion in Washington.
He 'splained that one away - it wuz Boosch. He ain't explained Benghazi.
It is far from clear how big a political liability either will turn out to be.
The media will just ... LOOK! Squirrel!
On Friday, for instance, news of the IRS admission and developments surrounding the Benghazi attack turned White House press secretary Jay Carney's daily briefing into a feeding frenzy and drowned out coverage of a speech that Obama was giving that day on the implementation of the health-care law that stands as his biggest achievement.
White House officials acknowledge that the history of modern second-term presidencies is a sobering one, replete with scandal and failure. But they insist that they have seen nothing to suggest that Obama will fall into the traps that have ensnared so many of his predecessors: nothing that rivals the Watergate investigation that drove Richard M. Nixon out of office in 1974, the Iran-contra scandal that nearly derailed Ronald Reagan's presidency in 1986,or the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998.
The current furor will serve only to make Obama's opponents look bad, they predict.
mmwwhahaHAHAHhahahah! Really!
But even some of Obama's allies worry privately that his difficulties may be made worse by his "There is no evidence the White House is hiding the truth about what occurred in Benghazi,"
"Benghazi and the IRS, each one taken in isolation is in the ankle-biting category," said historian David Kennedy. "But if you add up enough ducks, they can peck you to death. It's a sea of trouble."
Chris Lehane, one of the "masters of disaster" who ran the damage-control operation in the Clinton White House,
It took me until I was about 12 to learn that the first one with a credible story to Mommy was usually believed.
For instance, "if they had put those [Benghazi] e-mails out on their own terms, they would have gotten a little more of the benefit of the doubt," Lehane said. "There's no question that if they had basically applied the fundamentals of crisis management, they would be in a different situation today."
But with the attack happening less than two months before voters went to the polls last year, "they may have made the decision that it was better to win the presidential election and deal with the fallout on the other side," Lehane said.
History suggests that rocky terrain lay ahead on that other side. "Every second-term president, at least since Eisenhower with the U-2 [spy plane shot down in Soviet airspace] has somehow gone into a ditch," said Ken Duberstein, who was White House chief of staff during Reagan's second term.
"The suggestions that Obama is in a deep ditch are probably
Sharpen that baby up, I say! Get another strong back into the ditch! Make room under the bus!