David Jackson and Susan Page: Year 6 Not Kind To Presidents
For President Bush, 2005 was a year of growing public impatience with the Iraq war, angst over record gas prices, devastation from Hurricane Katrina, the collapse of his Social Security plan and, finally, a firestorm over his decision to authorize targeted domestic spying without court warrants.
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It was in the sixth year of their presidencies that Bill Clinton was impeached and Richard Nixon was forced to resign, that Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower faced the worst scandals of their tenures and that Franklin Roosevelt encountered increased resistance to New Deal legislation.
The White House and its allies see opportunities, though, sixth year or not. "This president has a real pattern of defying conventional wisdom," says Mark McKinnon, media adviser for Bush's presidential campaigns.
Top aides say Bush aims to travel more often and speak out more forcefully, touting the economy as underappreciated good news. The Pentagon already has canceled the deployment to Iraq of two brigades, or about 7,000 soldiers, the first small step in a hoped-for drawdown of U.S. troops there. To avoid the sort of stalemate that undermined his Social Security proposal, Bush will downsize his domestic agenda, proposing changes in immigration law but shelving, at least for now, plans for a tax overhaul.
"I've been thinking long and hard about 2006," Bush told reporters Sunday. White House spokesman Scott McClellan says the basic game plan is simple: "The economy and progress in Iraq."
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No modern two-term president has escaped the six-year itch, but some have recovered more successfully than others.
Roosevelt dealt with the approach of World War II and won third and fourth terms. Reagan replaced the top aides implicated in the Iran-contra scandal and negotiated arms control with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Their dialogue help speed the end of the Cold War.
"If circumstances favor you and you're pragmatic enough to respond to those circumstances, it's not impossible" to recover, Dallek says. "But it's hard."
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By November of a president's sixth year, voters usually seem eager for new faces and policies; that's why the party that has held the White House typically suffers big losses in the midterm elections. Many members of Congress, even friendly ones, begin worrying more about their own re-election and less about loyalty to the president.
...
It was in the sixth year of their presidencies that Bill Clinton was impeached and Richard Nixon was forced to resign, that Ronald Reagan and Dwight Eisenhower faced the worst scandals of their tenures and that Franklin Roosevelt encountered increased resistance to New Deal legislation.
The White House and its allies see opportunities, though, sixth year or not. "This president has a real pattern of defying conventional wisdom," says Mark McKinnon, media adviser for Bush's presidential campaigns.
Top aides say Bush aims to travel more often and speak out more forcefully, touting the economy as underappreciated good news. The Pentagon already has canceled the deployment to Iraq of two brigades, or about 7,000 soldiers, the first small step in a hoped-for drawdown of U.S. troops there. To avoid the sort of stalemate that undermined his Social Security proposal, Bush will downsize his domestic agenda, proposing changes in immigration law but shelving, at least for now, plans for a tax overhaul.
"I've been thinking long and hard about 2006," Bush told reporters Sunday. White House spokesman Scott McClellan says the basic game plan is simple: "The economy and progress in Iraq."
...
No modern two-term president has escaped the six-year itch, but some have recovered more successfully than others.
Roosevelt dealt with the approach of World War II and won third and fourth terms. Reagan replaced the top aides implicated in the Iran-contra scandal and negotiated arms control with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. Their dialogue help speed the end of the Cold War.
"If circumstances favor you and you're pragmatic enough to respond to those circumstances, it's not impossible" to recover, Dallek says. "But it's hard."
...
By November of a president's sixth year, voters usually seem eager for new faces and policies; that's why the party that has held the White House typically suffers big losses in the midterm elections. Many members of Congress, even friendly ones, begin worrying more about their own re-election and less about loyalty to the president.