Obama's Last Chance

Back to town comes Barack Obama, to plummeting polls and sour columns rolling his presidency into the hearse. The memory doesn't offer much comfort, but the previous two Democratic presidents endured similar rentrées to the nation's capital.

When Bill Clinton returned from his outing to Martha's Vineyard in the late summer of 1993, the collapse of his administration was already three months old. He was well into his rebirth cycle as a committed Republican. As an opposing, progressive challenge to business as usual, even by the wan standard of its own timid promises, his presidency had decisively failed by the closing week of May, on the last Saturday of which he signaled surrender by recruiting the old Nixon/Reagan/Bush hand David Gergen as his new public relations chief.

Jimmy Carter achieved his zenith as an agent of positive change on his second day in office: "I, Jimmy Carter, President of the United States, do hereby grant a full, complete and unconditional pardon to: (1) all persons who may have committed any offense between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973 in violation of the Military Selective Service Act...and (2) all persons heretofore convicted, irrespective of the date of conviction, of any offense committed between August 4, 1964 and March 28, 1973 in violation of the Military Selective Service Act...restoring to them full political, civil and other rights."

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