Obama and the doomsayers

But contra MacGillis, I think most of the writers making the Obama-Bush comparisons understand that point, and they would presumably say, “okay, yes, Bush retained the powers of the presidency, but somewhere between the failure of Social Security reform and the 2006 thumping he passed over a crucial threshold where 1) he no longer had a hope in Hades of moving big-ticket legislation through Congress and 2) he no longer had a plausible path to recovering the public’s trust.” That’s what Washington scribes tend to mean when they apply the shorthand term “finished” to a presidency, and it seems perfectly reasonable to look at a chief executive in Obama’s position — his second-term numbers mirroring Bush rather than Reagan or Clinton, his base eroding, his party’s odds of losing the Senate rising, his defenders beginning to talk about long-term policy vindication more than short-term political success — and ask whether he’s reached that point as well.

I’m not sure he has; I think we’ll have a better sense of the Obamacare rollout’s imprint on his second term in February than we do today. But I do think that such points of no return (or no return absent a hostage crisis) exist for elected officials, regardless of the powers they retain, and trying to discern those inflection points and their implications (for 2014 and immigration reform, in this case, among other issues) is part of the pundit’s job description.