Throughout history, second-term presidents have been cursed with political angst and turmoil. According to Susan Page P'08, Washington bureau chief for USA Today, no modern-day second-term president has had it worse than George W. Bush.
But there is hope for Bush - in the words of Page, he "is not toast quite yet, but he is definitely in the toaster."
Page and husband Carl Leubsdorf P'08, the Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News, spoke in MacMillan 115 on Thursday about the problems Bush currently faces and what voters should expect from the 2008 presidential election.
Page and Leubsdorf, the parents of Herald Senior Staff Writer Ben Leubsdorf '08, spoke as part of this year's Brown Daily Herald lecture series. The lecture was titled "Is Bush Toast?"
Most presidents have an awful time with their second terms - presidents from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Franklin D. Roosevelt and Bill Clinton have had their share of second-term woes, the career political journalists said.
"The fact is that Bush is having trouble with his second term," Page said. "What has happened is almost inevitable. His first-term chickens came home to roost."
Bush's "chickens" include the war in Iraq and tax cuts introduced while the government overspent on defense, Carl Leubsdorf said. Though Bush inherited a fiscal surplus from Clinton, it was "squandered," he said.
According to Leubsdorf, Bush has lost some Republican support because he has done "precious little" about the national debt. The gridlock on Capitol Hill over fiscal policy will not be resolved until a fresh candidate is seated in the Oval Office, Leubsdorf added.
Page said she has never seen the Bush team as "discombobulated" as it is now - not even after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or Sen. John McCain's win in the 2000 New Hampshire primary.
"They're significantly more dismayed now ... than they were during the Sept. 11 attacks," Page said.
Leubsdorf noted the administration's "fumbling performance" after Hurricane Katrina and the indictment of top White House aide I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.
Leubsdorf turned the audience's attention to the Democratic Party's prospects in the next presidential election, which he said start and end with one person: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. Although Democrats have been trying to reform the primary system, the frontrunner with the most money will almost always secure the party's nomination, he said.
If Clinton wins the nomination, she may face stiff competition from McCain, the Arizona Republican, in the general election, Leubsdorf said.
While McCain is by all means a conservative, Leubsdorf said, he is widely recognized for going against many of Bush's policies. Should he run, he may stand on a centrist platform focusing on fiscal policy involving cutting spending and cutting back on Bush's tax cuts.
Leubsdorf and Page took questions from students and local residents about the Electoral College, voter turnout and campaign finance reform, which Leubsdorf called a "lost cause."
Leubsdorf was the editor in chief of the Cornell Daily Sun and received a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University. He has worked for the Associated Press and the Baltimore Sun and has spent the last 25 years at the Dallas Morning News.
The biggest and most challenging change in journalism over his career is the "enormous amount of information and speed" now integral to the news industry, Leubsdorf told The Herald. He said there are many more outlets for reporting than there used to be, many of which are not necessarily journalistically accurate.
Page was editor of the Daily Northwestern and also received her master's in journalism from Columbia University. She has worked at Newsday and has spent the last 10 years at USA Today.
Page told The Herald that she considers it a privilege to go out and see "interesting things" and report back to her readers. She said she often covers subjects that people feel strongly about and said that "criticism comes with the territory."
