'Lame Duck' Barack Obama must compromise or fade away, analysts warn
Myriad challenges face the US president as he enters his final two years. Analysts say he will need to compromise if he is to secure his legacy
Now US President Barack Obama limps into his final two years in office.
All second-term presidents lose considerable clout at this mark. But Obama's time as a lame duck comes amid a political climate so fractured that compromise between Congress and him is all but impossible. And the Republican takeover of the Senate further complicates his power to confront an array of foreign and domestic policy challenges, the range of which is daunting.
Though the US economy is growing, wages are stagnant and the global economy is faltering. Islamic State has racked up victories in Iraq and Syria, even as the US rains down air strikes. The appearance of the Ebola virus in the United States has raised questions about whether a weary White House can handle several crises at once. A budget deal that bought peace with Congress for a while is nearing its end.
Against that backdrop, Obama heads to Asia and Australia next week for summit meetings, even as the old Congress returns to Washington for its own lame-duck session to finish work on the budget. And a new Senate looms, Republican-led.
Obama will make one move without Congress. Aides said on Tuesday that he would sign an executive order by the end of December giving temporary legal status to help some of the 11 million immigrants who are in the country illegally stay and work in the US. He had previously delayed the order, when Democrats feared a backlash would cost them their jobs. With that, he may have little room left to work with a Republican-led Congress.
"There would have to be a really exceptional set of events to get people who have shown no interest in cooperating to get something done," said Ken Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It is very hard to see any substantial legislation."
It's "difficult under the best of circumstances" for presidents to get much done in the closing years of their terms, Mayer said. And Republican control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate would probably "embolden a lot of Republicans to put some oomph, some weight, behind the things they've been doing the past 3½ years", he said.