The Second Term Blues

Presidents, prime ministers, chancellors - even the ones who've defined eras - have all had a tough go of it in their second terms. Just ask Gerhard Schröder now

Eisenhower's second term in the White House was before my time and I've only got one mental image of it: the president in khakis, wiling away the hours on the golf course. Sure, history marched on, the Cold War gathered steam, and generally, things happened in the late 50s, but the overall impression of Eisenhower's second term is of a gentle, aging man riding out the wave of American postwar prosperity. Almost as if he were already retired. As two ambitious upstarts, Kennedy and Nixon, contended for his office, he was more than upstaged; he seemed totally eclipsed until, just three days before leaving office, he startled everyone by actually saying something memorable in his prescient "militar y-industrial complex" speech.

Any man or woman who strives to become the US president, British prime minister, German chancellor and so on, also has a drive, usually fueled by a variable mixture of ego and genuine vision, to leave a mark on history. And it's generally understood that it takes two terms to make that mark. No one thinks of, say, the years that Gerald Ford ran things as an "era." Since Eisenhower, the US has had, roughly defined, five one-term presidents and three two-termers. Painting in broad strokes, then, since JFK, whose unfinished first term will forever remain an impenetrable amalgam of what-might-have-beens, we could say that the US has undergone three eras interspersed with transitions - buffer presidencies.

But there's a disheartening pall over the second halves of all three eras. Nixon? Watergate. Reagan? Iran-contra. Clinton? Monica Lewinsky. Policy-wise, too, the thrust of each of these men's very different visions and agendas sort of petered out once they were sworn in a second time.

Turn to Britain. The very qualities the Brits so much admired in their Iron Lady eventually soured them on her, although it took until midway into Thatcher's third term before she was finally, decisively nudged out of 10 Downing Street. John Major sleepwalked for a remarkably long while not to have left much of an impression before Blair swept in and commentators could start throwing around the word "era" again.

Now, with his 50th birthday going on for a month, it seems, it's assessment time. Has Cool Britannia given way to the image of Britain as America's errand boy? Will Blair "again fail the big test of his leadership, a failure that is the more acute because he has defined the test for himself," as Andrew Rawnsley argues in the Guardian he indeed will when Britain's entry into the euro is delayed once more?

"Modernizing" Germany

Second terms rarely fail to tarnish the accomplishments of the first. Chancellor Gerhard Schröder had a very rough first year or two, but it was an exhilarating year or two as well. The "Berliner Republic" was just as ridiculed as "Cool Britannia," but both brands worked anyway. They were silly but nonetheless exciting: a fresh wind was blowing, all that.

It was often hard to discern any cohesive vision among the dust clouds of a fallout with his first finance minister and a war in Kosovo on the one hand and the government's actual, physical move to Berlin and a booming (and bubbling) global economy on the other. But in terms of foreign policy, what emerged from the offices of Schröder and Fischer, his foreign minister, was essentially the idea that the time had come for Germany to find itself a more prominent role on the international stage. Germany would build its Holocaust Memorial in its new capital, yes, but it would also cease to live completely in the shadow of that defining moment of the 20th century. This was, after all, the 21st.

Domestically, changes were no less radical. Again, Schröder would take a page from Blair's playbook; they'd even release a revised version of it together. The "New Middle," the "Third Way," whatever. The names changed, but while French Prime Minister Jospin grimaced, Blair and Schröder, their eyes fixed enviously on the rapid yet sustained growth going on over there across the Atlantic, each hoped to apply the Clinton formula to their own countries and then see it applied throughout the EU: hook the wagons to the "new economy" and salvage only those parts of the welfare state that could justify their costs, as if government were a cluster of profit centers.

Schröder found his Gordon Brown in Hans Eichel. Together, they talked about "modernizing" Germany and rammed through the biggest tax and spending cuts in postwar German history. The people protested. They fumed. They voted Social Democrats down in state and local elections. But Schröder stuck by his rough medicine because he was confident it would cure what ailed the country.

A positive sign that might be something

Jump-cut to the here and now. Winning the second term was tough but nearly ever day since has been tougher. For one thing, the medicine hasn't worked. In fact, exposing a national economy to the whims of the wildly moody global one has meant that Germany has opted in too late to enjoy the fruits of the boom but is feeling the full brunt of the bust.

Last week, Eichel conceded that his program would meet none of its goals. There'll be no balanced budget by 2006. Debts will be greater this year than the originally foreseen 18.9 billion euros. Nor will Germany meet the requirements of the EU stability pact; once again, deficits will surpass 3 percent of GDP. Growth has stalled practically to a standstill and the unemployment rate is constantly flirting with the 10 percent mark.

"No one in the cabinet has fallen as hard as the finance minister," Der Spiegel asserts in this week's issue. "The budget - a case for the garbage can." And that's only one of a series of denunciations in a harsh piece claiming that Schröder himself has grown as tired of every member of his cabinet - except economic and labor "superminister" Wolfgang Clement - as Der Spiegel has.

Even Germany's international star has fallen. Fischer is struggling with his weight again, a supposed manifestation of his frustration with being cast by the US back to the chorus line while "New European" ministers are being given speaking roles (see Carrots and Sticks). Breaking with Blair and forging an informal alliance with Chirac was absolutely the right thing for Schröder and Fischer to do, however politically expedient, but when it's a seemingly invincible power scoffing at international law, waging dubious wars and threatening more to come, doing the right thing will win you few points on the international scoreboard.

It's doubtful that Schröder's "Agenda 2010" (see Confidence Man II) will have any more impact on the German economy than any number of other factors might - a soaring euro, a swing up or down in the markets for whatever reason or, heaven forbid, another disaster of 9/11 proportions - but if it's eventually implemented and, with the help of the international financial press, is perceived as a positive sign that the government is actually doing something, well, that might be something.

But Schröder is dead-on right reading this moment as a decisive one in terms of a choice between a world dominated by a single superpower, especially one whose goals aren't all beneficent by any means, and a multipolar world with all its inherent checks and balances. And he's not alone, so the choice has certainly not already been made.

In other words, this is no time for Schröder to come down with a case of second term blues.

Elsewhere

In the Guardian, Jeevan Vasaga tells the movie-ready story of Franz and Tatjana Gsell. Franz, an aging but "celebrated" plastic surgeon in Nuremberg, put Tatjana, "a plain, dumpy girl from a backwoods Bavarian town," under the knife maybe 20 times "in a quest to create 'the perfect woman'. If, that is, your notion of the perfect woman is a Eurotrash babe." Then she ran off with a car salesman and kept on spending Franz's fortune until he threatened to cut her off. Someone then attacked Franz with - how's this for poetic justice - an axe.

Reuters reports on the first file-sharing arrests in Germany last week.