By John Harwood

New York Times

Two years ago, as President Barack Obama wrestled with an array of political challenges, pundits and partisans reached for a familiar explanation: the “second-term curse.”

To conservative opponents, battles over the Affordable Care Act website, Internal Revenue Service practices and the Benghazi attack signaled the Democratic president’s failure.

A former economic adviser to Obama, Lawrence H. Summers, seeing echoes of second-term struggles for presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush, revived the idea of a constitutional shift to a single six-year presidency.

Such talk has all but vanished. Obama has overseen shrinking unemployment, a reduction in the proportion of Americans without health insurance and diplomatic breakthroughs on trade, climate policy, relations with Cuba and Iran’s nuclear program. Republicans are now more likely to denounce his ideology and use of executive power than his competence.

“Unfortunately, I think he has been successful at achieving his agenda,” Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said recently.

Former Rep. Vin Weber, R-Minn., who came to power in Ronald Reagan’s landslide in 1980, said: “It’s very hard for Republicans to acknowledge that. But you can’t deny the successes.”

Smooth sailing in the final year is by no means guaranteed. Ten months before Bill Clinton left office, the technology bubble burst; the 2008 Wall Street collapse made a ruin of Bush’s final chapter. Frightened by the Paris and San Bernardino attacks, most Americans say Obama’s strategy against the Islamic State isn’t working. But the evidence points to a second term for Obama that is more successful than most.

“If you go back to the Truman era, his stacks up favorably — in fact, much better than the majority,” said Thomas Cronin, a scholar of the presidency at Colorado College.

Presidential achievement takes different forms. Some predecessors accomplished more with Congress in second terms. Reagan, for example, signed sweeping overhauls of the tax and immigration systems.

But partisan polarization has steadily made legislative compromise more difficult. Although Obama still hopes that Congress will approve his Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, he has spent much of his second term using his executive authority and fending off Republican attempts to thwart him.

Presidential historian Robert Dallek described Obama’s performance as “well above average,” calling it a model for an era of ferocious partisanship.

“That he can carry this off sort of sets a new parameter,” Dallek said.

National consensus remains beyond Obama’s reach. As measured by Gallup, his approval rating among Republicans has remained below 20 percent throughout his second term; his approval among Democrats has remained at 75 percent or higher.

Those numbers broadly resemble the partisan divide over Bush’s second term, a split that has inflamed a steady stream of allegations over management of the IRS, the Department of Veterans Affairs and the Justice Department, among others.

Yet none has blossomed into the sort of second-term disaster suffered by Reagan with the Iran-Contra scandal, or Clinton with the Monica Lewinsky affair — not to mention Richard Nixon with Watergate.

“Compared to recent presidents, the number of scandals is exceptionally low,” said Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston professor who monitors executive branch scandals.

The closest thing to a public corruption prosecution tied to an Obama appointee’s official duties was a guilty plea by former CIA director David Petraeus in 2015 to a misdemeanor charge for allowing his mistress access to classified material.

The durability of Obama’s second-term legacy depends partly on his successor. Every twice-elected president since World War II left office with Congress controlled by the opposing party. Unless Senate Democrats gain at least four seats in November, Obama will, too.

Even a friendly successor could discard Obama’s initiatives if they prove ineffective. Weber, the former lawmaker, questions whether the Cuba opening will change much, for example, and said, “I’m not sure the Iran deal’s going to accomplish what he wants.”

The only judgment possible now, Weber added, is this: “He did it.”

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