Third-Year Blues

 

In the dark winter of 1946-47, as a cold new war was beginning to take shape, Harry S. Truman went for a walk down the dark halls of the White House and communed with the spirits of his predecessors. He knew them better than most; few presidents had read history as deeply. Yet he was in a somber mood that night, aware of his low approval ratings, and the impossibility of a job that had grown so big no one could master it. He was particularly drawn to the failures who had walked those same corridors:
“The floors pop and crack all night long,” he wrote in his diary. “Anyone with imagination can see old Jim Buchanan walking up and down worrying about conditions not of his making. Then there’s Van Buren who inherited a terrible mess from his predecessor as did poor old James Madison. Of course Andrew Johnson was the worst mistreated of any of them. But they all walk up and down the halls of this place and moan about what they should have done and didn’t. So — you see. I’ve only named a few. The ones who had Boswells and New England historians are too busy trying to control heaven and hell to come back here. So the tortured souls who were and are misrepresented in history are the ones who come back. It’s a hell of a place.”
You can tell where his mind was leading him. What a terrible thing to become president when the guy before you screwed up everything! Truman had too much awe before the ghost of F.D.R. to utter that thought out loud, but it was in there, pecking away.
Since leaving office in 1953, Truman has become a patron saint for unpopular presidents. In his final year as president, his approval rating dropped to 22 percent, the lowest ranking ever registered. Voters were angry over a war (in Korea) that was taking too long to win, a stagnant economy and a feeling that the country was not advancing. Now he is considered one of the more popular presidents of the 20th century, and ranks regularly in the top 10 on the lists of great and nearly great presidents he loved to compile.
No one would blame Barack Obama if he too were walking the halls of the White House late at night, cursing the mess he inherited. Truman’s comeback could be comforting to Obama. Year Three is traditionally a hard time for a president, and Obama has been no exception. Recent polls show his approval ratings plummeting. With a hostile Congress blocking his every move and little relief in sight for unemployment, deficit reduction or a “Grand Bargain” of any kind, Obama has shifted into the Truman-like stance of attacking Congress at every step. For the next year, we will hear two very different narratives of American history. Each side will attack the other as the reason that the economy is faltering, and it is reasonably certain that Obama will travel abroad a good deal to bolster his foreign policy credentials as he heads into an election year. Plus, it’s just so pleasant to leave Washington when everyone is sniping at you.
Why is Year Three historically dismal? Presidents routinely experience a decline in popularity as the impossible dream of transformational change gives way to the reality of gridlock, cynicism and an insatiable media cycle that inherently prefers extremism to moderation. Paradoxically, the more hope a candidate inspires, the more vicious the downturn can be. Jimmy Carter promised about as much change as anyone when he was elected in 1976 with the evangelical promise that he would reinvent American politics in the aftermath of Watergate and Vietnam. In 1979 he suffered through the Islamic Revolution and hostage crisis in Iran, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and the famous attack by a “killer rabbit” while paddling a canoe.
In many ways, Carter was his own worst enemy, and his righteous indignation at the world’s imperfections did not always serve him well in the topsy-turvy realm of foreign policy (his diary entry for Dec. 25, 1978: “On Christmas Day the Egyptians prayed that my hemorrhoids would be cured because I was a good man, and the following day they were cured.”) At the same time, his achievements were real, in the Middle East and elsewhere, but the feeling of a presidency paddling in circles persisted until his defeat by Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Are we entering a similar danger zone for Obama? Is “The One” done? All presidents experience serious challenges in Year Three; some weather the storms better than others. Bill Clinton endured the Oklahoma City attack of 1995 and the government shutdown of 1995-6, but his refusal to cave in to Newt Gingrich was the turning point of his presidency. Many who decry the current breakdown between the Republicans and the Democrats assume that politics has never been worse, but the Clinton-Gingrich showdown was a grim contest between parties hardening their antipathy toward each other. Clinton prevailed not only because of his natural political skills (and a conveniently unlovable opponent in Gingrich), but because of a rising economic tide that created millions of new jobs.
Clinton may also have benefited from a strength we do not remember as quickly — his immense enjoyment of the world stage. Despite some shaky first steps in Somalia and Haiti he had found his footing by the mid-90s and his Year Three, 1995, was a watershed year in many ways. He forced a not-very-compliant set of allies and local belligerents into peace negotiations over Bosnia, he began to seriously engage on Northern Ireland, and he engineered the complex and expensive bailout of the Mexican peso. He also went abroad more and more, bringing his successful approach to retail politics into the foreign policy arena. In country after country, he pressed the flesh, gave outdoor speeches and seemed to genuinely appreciate the chance to mingle. At the end of 1993, his first year in office, he had only been to three countries — Canada, Japan and South Korea. By the end of 1995, he had been to 38. In one busy six-week period, in November and December 1995, Clinton gave a stirring eulogy of Yitzhak Rabin in Israel, spoke to enthusiastic throngs in Northern Ireland and Ireland, and signed the Bosnian peace treaty in Paris. His comfort on the world stage was obvious, and voters responded.
But the strategy of international travel does not always work for a beleaguered chief executive. It did surprisingly little for George H.W. Bush. In the aftermath of the first Gulf War of 1990-1, his approval rankings were an astonishing 90 percent. In his short time in office, he had already presided over the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, the demise of the Soviet Union, the liberation of Eastern Europe, the removal of a distasteful dictator in Panama, the Madrid peace conference that launched the Middle East peace process, and the release of Nelson Mandela from Robben Island prison in South Africa. Very few presidents experience that kind of change in two terms, let alone one. Though he was more active on some of those fronts than others, Bush led the United States wisely through the mysterious labyrinth of the New World Order, as he called it.
But if Truman is a hero to unpopular presidents, the senior Bush offers a cautionary tale to those who have the misfortune to become popular at the wrong moment. In 1991, a bruising recession followed the Gulf War, and Bush’s ineffectual response undid much of his popularity. Indeed, his mastery of foreign policy may have accentuated the problem — he simply went abroad too often. The year 1992 dawned inauspiciously when Bush, near the end of a 12-day trip to Asia, vomited at a ceremonial banquet in Japan. It’s absurd to let one gastrointestinal disorder speak as loudly as it did, but something in that upheaval spoke to Americans — if spoke is the right word. He spent the rest of the year in a fight for survival, in every direction; against a far right (personified by Pat Buchanan) that disliked his obsession with foreign affairs, a popular third-party candidate in H. Ross Perot, and a charismatic Democratic opponent in Bill Clinton. Besieged from the right and the left, he had nowhere to go. Paradoxically, the sense of liberation that the world was feeling in the early 90s led to his own eviction, despite all that he had done to help the new world begin.
Another president with an impressive foreign policy record was Richard Nixon. Perhaps there has been no bigger coup in the last 50 years than the opening of U.S.-Chinese relations in 1972. Handily re-elected, he began his second term looking forward to a welter of new foreign policy accomplishments. In June and July of 1974 he went to Russia. In a country where dourness was mandatory for leaders, the Russians found him charming, and his warm reception must have offered a fleeting escape from the daily revelations of the Watergate scandal. It was the last trip of his presidency. A little over a month later, he would resign.
Today, as we enter another election season, Reagan will surely be summoned by the G.O.P. faithful. Republican candidates will clamor to present themselves as the heir to his legacy, even if there is no clear consensus on what that legacy is. The advocate of heavy defense spending, or of dramatic cuts in nuclear arsenals? The charismatic leader of the West, or the confused meddler in Iran-Contra? A glance at his Year Three shows plenty of problems — the truck bomb that killed 241 U.S. service members in Beirut in October 1983, a rising poverty rate, declining approval ratings, and several gaffes from the podium, including an attack on Lenin’s “Ten Commandments” of Communism (no such commandments exist) and a fictitious story about a Medal of Honor winner, probably borrowed from the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer.
But Reagan was able to ride out these problems with his persistent optimism and an ability to surprise his opponents and sometimes his followers. Tip O’Neill, the House Speaker who led the Democrats in many of the negotiations with Reagan, often praised their working relationship. Even the foreign leader who might have been first to criticize Reagan, François Mitterrand, got at something essential when he found important qualities to like: “This is a man without ideas and without culture. A sort of liberal, for sure, but beneath the surface you find someone who isn’t stupid, who has great good sense and profoundly good intentions. What he does not perceive with his intellect, he feels by nature.”
And of course, voters will hear about the man Obama succeeded, George W. Bush. It is likely they will hear more about him from the Democrats than the Republicans, as the president who left an empty treasury and two expensive wars for Obama to clean up. His Year Three (2003) felt a lot more triumphant at the time than it does now, and few want to relive the Iraq invasion, “Mission Accomplished,” or their aftermath.
But there is an eternal cycle to reputation and renewal, and it is likely that Bush will rise somewhat in the ratings in the years ahead, as the memory of his mistakes recedes, and we begin to miss some of the moral certainties of his era.
A wave of Clinton nostalgia has engulfed America in recent months, stoked by a yearning for job creation, to be sure, but also because of a natural cycle that seems to require nostalgia to set in around 10 years after popular television shows, songs and presidents have completed their rendezvous with destiny. That would put Bush’s return to popularity at about 2018. With small gestures — Bush’s repudiation of Dick Cheney’s extremism, and his support for victims of natural disasters — and with a refusal to join the critics carping at Obama, 43 has set himself up well for an eventual rebound.
Obama is of course his own man, in his own relationship with history. And history has a maddening way of not repeating itself, to the eternal frustration of historians everywhere. None of these parallels sits exactly right. But a study of the way in which his predecessors have fought through their Year Three problems offers a few ideas about correctives at home and abroad. Some foreign travel, but not too much. A persistent ability to project confidence even when the facts do little to support it. Some audacious peace initiatives. A restless spirit of innovation, a refusal to be cowed, and a campaigner’s love of crowds, at home and abroad. An ability to confound the French (Reagan was a liberal?). And above all else, a strong caution around undercooked Japanese food.