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Second terms are difficult.

Woodrow Wilson won the narrowest of re-elections in 1916 on a promise that he “kept us out of war” and promptly got the country into World War I. Grant’s second term was a mess of scandal and mismanagement that has forever tarnished his reputation. Reagan had Iran-Contra, Clinton had Monica and, in what was really his second term, Truman had Korea.

One of the great cautionary tales of the American presidency was Franklin Roosevelt’s second term. After winning a stunning landslide re-election, FDR squandered his massive goodwill with an audacious plan to expand the Supreme Court. Rebuffed on that hubristic notion, Roosevelt doubled down and attempted to “purge” fellow Democrats who the president thought too conservative. Every one of them survived and after 1937 Roosevelt never again commanded a working majority in the Congress for his domestic agenda. Had Roosevelt’s presidency ended after two terms, and had he been denied a chance to lead the nation during World War II, we might remember him today as a president who badly overreached in his second term and failed miserably.

Second terms are difficult. The very attributes that make a president feel comfortable in his second act are the ones that all too often get them in trouble – too much confidence, too much insulation from the rest of the world, a since of pride (hubris?) that the re-elected president has succeeded and his foes have not. Pride does goeth before a fall. Second terms are also marked by exhaustion, by staff members who get to thinking more about themselves than the job or the boss and by an almost inevitable running out of steam.

Barack Obama’s full-throated defense of political liberalism in his second inaugural address will be celebrated by many who have wondered if the cerebral college professor and community organizer is really committed to the progressive agenda. Wonder no more. However, great political speeches – and his will, I predict, go down in history as a great inaugural speech – require great political implementation if the ideas they embody are to be more than historical footnotes.

The real challenge for the president in his second term, more than avoiding scandal and overreach, is how he will apply the grease of political action to the sticky gears of political Washington. Since everyone has an opinion: here is a modest, yet attainable second term agenda for a president who has already past the rest of being transformative.

In a Nixon-goes-to-China way, Obama has a unique opportunity to be the American president who crafts a comprehensive reform of the big three entitlement programs – Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security – in a way that secures the essential national safety net for at least a generation. Talk about a legacy. Obama, because he truly believes in these programs, can be the transformative guy who makes them work far into the future. He’ll need to offend some of his friends, but what’s the presidency for anyway? Obama can stitch together a grand bargain – budget reductions, entitlement reforms, revenue, the whole ball of wax – if he wants, but he’ll need to bargain and trade. The question is whether he’s willing and able to go big and try to secure a truly historic deal.

On climate change, the president can merely order the EPA to aggressively regulate greenhouse gases and avoid a huge and eventually pointless fight with Congress and the energy industry. At the same time, the president can get his new Secretary of State working harder on meaningful international agreements. Obama also needs a sharp, politically effective EPA Administrator. How about bringing former New Jersey Republican Gov. Christine Todd Whitman to EPA?

The country is already moving in the direction Obama stressed in the human and civil rights portions of his speech yesterday. Younger Americans, those under 35 say, don’t need to be convinced that the country’s civil rights agenda should be expanded more broadly to include gays. As Martin Luther King, Jr. (and others) have famously said, and Obama clearly knows, “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” Obama stands on the right side of history here and those who oppose him will find the country steadily moving away from them. He merely needs to continue to give voice and direction to the movement.

By the same token, given enough presidential attention, the country will move, perhaps not fast enough for some of us, but move nonetheless, on guns. Obama can influence this debate, as he already has, by focusing on the moral dimension of the country’s culture of violence. He is again on the right side of history.

On immigration reform Obama needs a Republican ally. The element of surprise in politics is badly underrated. Obama could surprise, and advance his own agenda, by offering to work directly with, say Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, to fix one issue that most sensible Republicans now know is going to continue to keep them from winning national elections. Obama has absolutely nothing to lose by reaching out to scared Republicans on this issue. He’s got them right where he wants them.

Part of the historic difficulty with a second term is that something unexpected always turns up. FDR had to move the country from isolation to international engagement as World War II began. Truman had to fire Douglas MacArthur. Nixon had to confront the White House taping system. Andrew Jackson had to confront the nullification crisis. And like most presidents in a second term, Thomas Jefferson was often pre-occupied with foreign affairs.

One reason, I suspect, that so many of his political opponents dislike Barack Obama so much is that they know, deep down, that he is indeed a transformational figure; one of those once-in-a-generation figures who changes politics and public understanding in lasting ways. Perhaps he is even, as some suggest, the Reagan of the left for the 21st Century. In any event, his place in history is secure as the first African-American elected not once, but twice to the highest office in the land. But the difficult second term will determine much more – whether he was merely the first or whether he’ll be among the great.

Obama’s Model – Not 1994, but 1948

November 2nd will be long remembered for “the shellacking,” as Barack Obama put it, that he and Democrats took in the mid-term elections. It was a near historic rout often compared to the thumping Bill Clinton and Democrats took in 1994. But the election Obama ought to be studying for clues to his comeback in two years time is not ’94, but Harry Truman’s spectacular return from political death on another November 2nd in 1948.

Like Obama after last week’s election, Truman seemed like a dead man walking after the 1946 mid-terms. Republicans captured both houses of Congress, gaining 55 seats in the House and a dozen in the Senate, including the election of very conservative Republicans like Joseph McCarthy in Wisconsin, Zales Ecton in Montana and Henry Dworshak in Idaho. No question, 1946 was a banner year for the GOP. The big Republican win came with, and in part as a result of, Truman’s popularity being in the ditch. By election time, the President’s approval rating had slumped to 32%.

As Truman’s best biographer David McCullough has written: “According to one of the latest Washington jokes in the autumn of 1946, Truman was late for a Cabinet meeting because he woke up stiff in the joints from trying to put his foot in his mouth.”

Another line held that “to err is Truman.”

The Democratic defeat was so massive in 1946 and Truman’s role in bringing it about so obvious, that first -term Arkansas Sen. J. William Fulbright actually suggested that Truman, with no vice president to replace him, should resign the presidency after appointing respected Republican Sen. Arthur Vandenberg Secretary of State. Vandenberg would then become President and would be able to avoid what Fulbright saw as the fearsome prospect of divided government presided over by a hugely unpopular chief executive. Truman responded by forever referring to Fulbright as “Halfbright” and instead he came out fighting.

The seeds of Obama’s resurrection from the shellacking of the 2010 mid-terms may reside in Truman’s response 64 years ago. Truman doubled down on the Republicans, challenged them to enact their plans; plans strikingly similar to today – spending reductions, dismantling various social programs and opposition to national health care reform. No one – except Harry Truman – thought he could win in 1948, but he did and convincingly. Truman delighted in the fact that the very conservative Chicago Tribune got the election outcome wrong in its famous headline – Dewey Defeats Truman.

As Frank Rich noted in the New York Times Sunday, Obama can make a virtue, if he will, of the obvious and soon to grow splits in Republican ranks. In other words, he needs to shift the focus from his agenda to the new Republican agenda.

If the darlings of the Tea Party – Michelle Bachmann and Jim DeMint – really want, as Bachmann says, “to wean the country off Social Security and Medicare,” perhaps Obama should challenge them to bring forth the legislation. John Boehner and Mitch McConnell say they want to repeal the health care legislation and the President should welcome the discussion as the best chance he’ll have to reframe the national debate to make the case, in personal terms, that he has yet to make for the controversial legislation.

Obama needs to get out a Glenn Beck-style blackboard in the Roosevelt Room and explain how the GOP wants to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans by borrowing the money from China in order to keep putting the cash in Donald Trump’s or Michael Bloomberg’s pockets.

Every Tea Partier and Congressional Republican, and most Democrats, want to cut spending. OK, where and when do we start? The first qualifier when the talk turns to spending cuts is usually to take defense, homeland security and entitlements off the budget chopping block. That leaves about 15 cents of every dollar the federal government spends eligible for cuts. Obama should ask, where do we start? Student loans? The National Parks? Maybe raising the retirement age to 70 or eliminating the Department of Education? Maybe we ditch the new generation of littoral fighting ships the Navy desperately wants. That would save a cool $8 billion. Let’s really have the debate.

In his re-election in 1948 after his disastrous shellacking two years earlier, Harry Truman called the GOP bluff. As he suspected, the Republican’s ability to enact their program was much more limited than their ability to criticize Truman’s performance. Specifics and a lack of performance by the GOP eventually won out over hyperbole.

There is at least one other reason why Barack Obama should engage the new crowd in Congress directly on their ideas: the country desperately needs an adult conversation about priorities, spending, the deficit, the defense budget and entitlements. What better time to have it?

For two years, Obama’s operated his presidency in an often detached and dispassionate way. His White House seems to be all tactics, no overarching vision. Unless he provides that vision – and one way he can begin is to aggressively engage the Michelle Bachmann’s, Jim DeMint’s and Rand Paul’s of the new Congress – he will be a one-term president and, even worse, the great and serious debate the country needs about its priorities will disintegrate into a black swamp of politics as usual played out in dueling soundbites on Fox and MSNBC.

In David McCullough’s Truman, the superb Pulitzer Prize-winning story of the fighter from Missouri, the chapter on the 1948 election concludes with the analysis of Clark Clifford, Truman’s chief aide and strategist during that historic election.

“He was a good politician,” Clifford said of Truman, “a sensible politician…But that wasn’t why he was elected President…it was the remarkable courage in the man – his refusal to be discouraged, his willingness to go through the suffering of that campaign, the fatigue, the will to fight every step of the way, the will to win…

“It wasn’t Harry Truman the politician who won, it was Harry Truman the man.”

Their Finest Hour

Seven decades ago, western civilization teetered on the brink on a sandy spit of land in the French coast at a little town called Dunkirk.

Over the last few days of May and the first few days of June 1940, 340,000 British troops and thousands more French were evacuated from northern France in what was at the same time a remarkable save and a stunning defeat. Dunkirk, that is all that need be said, to conjure up the image of England literally standing alone against what appeared to be the total superiority of the Nazi war machine. The 70th anniversary of the Miracle of Dunkirk is being remembered in England this weekend.

One veteran who was taken off that bloody beach all those long years ago told the Guardian that the memory is “on my mind all day every day.”

It is hard to make great history – or great speeches – from abject defeat, but when England and the world needed it most, that most remarkable Englishman, Winston Churchill, rose to the occasion. His “finest hour” speech still stands as a superb historical document and as close as any politician can ever come to turning political rhetoric into lasting literature.

The last three paragraphs of the speech Churchill delivered in the House of Commons on June 18, 1940 begin:

“What (French) General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us.”

Churchill did many remarkable things with his speech after the Dunkirk disaster, not least being that he leveled with his country about its almost unbelievably dire circumstances. We take it for granted today that Britain would survive, that the United States would enter the war, that Hitler would be defeated. It wasn’t so clear in that long ago spring.

Read Winston’s words and put yourself in that place 70 years ago:

“Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this Island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”

Churchill later said that the British people had displayed the heart of a lion in standing up to Hitler. He had the honor to supply, as he said, “the roar.”

“Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.'”

We celebrate Memorial Day weekend with cookouts, baseball games, a few hours in the garden perhaps, and, I hope, with a few moments of pause to remember. Western civilization did hang in the balance 70 years ago.

It is history worth knowing and appreciating. Happy Memorial Day.

Footnote: There is a remarkable new wartime biography of Churchill – Winston’s War – by the acclaimed British World War II historian Max Hastings. It’s a terrific book. Hastings shows Churchill to be all that he was – brilliant, petulant, difficult, charming, a cigar smoking, champagne swilling leader and orator of the first order.

In the best tradition…

This is the way I’ll remember long-time Idaho state legislator Bruce Sweeney – smiling, never meeting a stranger, always trying to find a way to move the political ball down the field.

Sweeney, who represented Nez Perce County in the Idaho House and Senate for 20 years, died yesterday after a long battle with bone cancer. Following his senate career, Sweeney served on the Idaho Transportation Board for more than 10 years.

I will also remember Sweeney as one of a trio of Nez Perce County state senators who helped define the Idaho Democratic Party for more than 30 years. Bruce replaced Mike Mitchell in the state senate in 1982 and Mike replaced Cecil D. Andrus when he won the governorship in 1970.

Bruce Sweeney was also a tremendous track and field athlete. The University of Idaho proudly notes on Sweeney’s web page that the Vandal sprinter/hurdler was “never beaten by a Washington State” hurdler. Sweeney was a finalist in the U.S. Olympic Trials in 1956.

Bruce was a good pilot, too. During many years of observing and participating in Idaho politics, you accumulate a great many memories. I have a sharp memory of flying into the small airport at Caldwell in 1986, Bruce Sweeney in the left hand seat, Cece Andrus in the right. The Andrus campaign road show had missed a connection necessary to get us to the next political event, so the senator from Nez Perce loaded up the candidate and the press secretary and off we went into a dramatic Idaho summer morning.

That story is a good summary of Bruce Sweeney – do what is necessary to get the job done. His political and public service career is in the finest tradition of Idaho citizen-lawmakers.

He will be missed.