Meanwhile, George W. Bush — whose first term brought the criticisms and controversies associated with the invasion of Iraq, the subsequent struggling military campaigns there, the establishment of the terrorist detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, the passage of the Patriot Act, and simultaneous struggles within the U.S. economy — managed to rebound during his second term in a number of important ways.

First, and perhaps foremost in terms of lessons that Obama ought to heed from how Bush handled his second term, is how the 43rd president re-engineered his cabinet. He didn’t just change who was in top posts, but he changed the way his cabinet worked. This process began prior to Hurricane Katrina as he moved Condoleezza Rice from her post as national security advisor to secretary of state and asked her deputy, Stephen Hadley, to replace her in the national security advisor’s corner office in the West Wing. As secretary of state, Colin Powell, like Rice and others, suffered during Bush’s first term as a consequent of a national security process that was overly dominated by the close, sometimes process-circumventing collaboration between Vice President Dick Cheney and his former mentor, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. Rice told the president she was reluctant to accept the new post if it meant that she, like Powell, would end up being locked in permanent fights with Rumsfeld. This helped advance a process of retooling that was supported by having her onetime deputy at the National Security Council (NSC), not just because of the closeness between the two, but because of Hadley’s skill as a manager and honest broker who knew the NSC’s workings as well as any individual who had ever assumed the role.