WASHINGTON — With the voting for his successor getting underway in less than a month, President Barack Obama is moving up his State of the Union address a couple of weeks in hopes of laying out his closing agenda while
WASHINGTON — With the voting for his successor getting underway in less than a month, President Barack Obama is moving up his State of the Union address a couple of weeks in hopes of laying out his closing agenda while the country is still paying attention. And in the process, he hopes to defy expectations.
Obama heads into his final year in office determined to remain relevant even as the political center of gravity shifts toward the battle to replace him. The obstacles are daunting. The opposition controls Congress, and polls show doubts about his handling of critical issues. His megaphone does not project as far, and he will have to weigh the impact of using it on his party’s chances of retaining the presidency.
But as lawmakers, foreign leaders and even some of his own aides begin looking toward the day he will leave the White House, recent experience shows that the eighth year of a presidency can also be a time of enormous consequence in which the occupant of the Oval Office still matters, for better or worse. Whether through his own actions or because of the crises that invariably crop up, even a lame-duck president can play an outsize role.
“You’ve only got one president at a time, and that person has the constitutional authority and he’s the only one who has that constitutional authority,” said Kenneth M. Duberstein, who was President Ronald Reagan’s last White House chief of staff. “You still get your 3 o’clock-in-the-morning phone calls.”
During his eighth year in office, Reagan signed a free-trade agreement with Canada, secured the ratification of a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear arms and continued transforming the relationship with a declining Soviet Union. President Bill Clinton designated wide swaths of the West for conservation, enacted Plan Colombia to fight the drug flow from Latin America and signed laws expanding trade with Africa and granting China permanent most-favored-nation trade status.
President George W. Bush secured a strategic turnaround in the Iraq war and negotiated an agreement to gradually withdraw U.S. forces over three years, a plan essentially adopted by his successor. Like his predecessor, he used his executive power for conservation, establishing three vast new marine reserves in the Pacific Ocean that protect an area larger than California.
For Obama, even without the unforeseen, the challenges are formidable, including Russia’s intervention in Ukraine, China’s provocative behavior in the South China Sea and, most notably, the turmoil in the Middle East, where war against the Islamic State rages.
“These are big issues that his successor is definitely going to inherit, but he needs to be fully assertive using the levers of American power in the next 12 months,” said R. Nicholas Burns, a career diplomat who rose to undersecretary of state under Bush. “Given those risks, that’s going to be a full-time job this year.”
While he praises Obama for his nuclear agreement with Iran and the global climate change pact, Burns agrees with critics who say the president has been too passive in dealing with the seismic impact of Syria’s civil war and cannot simply tread water his final year.
“He needs to lead with more effectiveness and confidence in American power in Syria,” Burns said.
On the domestic front, Obama, who returned to Washington on Sunday from a two-week break in Hawaii, starts without the advantages of popularity that Reagan and Clinton had. Reagan, recovering from the Iran-contra scandal, entered his final year with an approval rating that was 50 percent and rising, and Clinton, after his impeachment in the Monica Lewinsky scandal, was at 60 percent.
By contrast, Obama, in the latest poll by The New York Times and CBS News, remained stuck at 44 percent, but that is still far better than Bush’s 29 percent at the same point. Obama has not enjoyed the support of a majority of Americans since the first weeks after his second inauguration.
Obama recognizes that the window for major legislation has nearly closed. Aides say his State of the Union address, scheduled for Jan. 12, will be more a thematic discussion of national priorities than the typical laundry list of proposals, an acknowledgment that the chances of passing most of his ideas have all but vanished.
The two major areas for possible collaboration with the Republican-led Congress are his Asian-Pacific trade agreement and legislation overhauling the criminal justice system. But Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, has suggested that Congress may wait to vote on the trade deal until after Obama leaves office.
So the president will flex his executive muscles as much as he can, even as critics complain of imperial overreach. He will start on Monday as he kicks off a drive to use his own authority to tighten regulation of gun sales, followed by a town-hall-style meeting about the issue on CNN on Thursday.
Joel P. Johnson, who was Clinton’s senior White House adviser in his final year, said a president at the end no longer needs to husband political capital.
“Spend every chip that you’ve acquired over your presidency, and spend them now,” he said. “You’re not hamstrung by future obligations, so you can get a lot of stuff done.”
He added that the intense partisan opposition to a president began to fade toward the end.
“Your haters are hating you less because they’re moving on to new people,” he said. “And the complainers in your own party stop complaining so much because they start appreciating you more.”
But while Obama may have no more elections left, he cannot afford to forget politics. Much of his ambition for 2016 is to use his bully pulpit to frame election issues to the advantage of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who is favored to win the Democratic nomination.
To that end, Johnson said, the president should work to improve his standing in the polls, because it would influence the outcome in November. That is not just about party unity. “One of the best legacies,” he said, “is to be succeeded by someone who’s going to continue your work.”
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