Inauguration 2013: Will President Obama's second term resemble Reagan's?

The Reagan years were hardly an era of partisan harmony. In 1984, Democratic House majority leader Jim Wright gave a floor speech accusing the president of misrepresenting meetings on deficit reduction, using the word "lie" eight times. House Speaker Tip O'Neill said, "The evil is in the White House at the present time." Harsh, partisan hearings for Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork – which ended in his rejection – left a stain on the nomination process.

Nevertheless, the White House was sometimes able to reach bipartisan legislative agreements, in part because Congress contained a fair number of conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans. Both groups are largely gone now, and the vital center has become no man's land.

For Obama, a harsher landscape is the backdrop to harder problems. Though deficits were large in the late 1980s, they are bigger today. Economic growth is more sluggish, and we are closer to the day when baby boomers will exhaust Social Security (30 years away) and Medicare that pays for hospital benefits (just 11 years).

So what can the president do? It will be hard for him to move his agenda without first tackling deficits and debt; and for that, he can put his rhetorical skills to work.

Like Reagan, Obama is a skilled communicator. He is more cerebral and professorial than Reagan, and he can turn that to his advantage.

Instead of staging partisan pep rallies (e.g., the cringe-making event that angered Republicans on the Hill and nearly ruined the "fiscal cliff" agreement) or offering soaring rhetoric (which is so four years ago), he should devote much of his remaining time to explaining – simply and directly – the magnitude of the economic problems ahead of us.

The wealthy are going to pay a higher tax rate, but it will not make much headway against the national debt. Neither will painless measures such as government reorganization. In his State of the Union message a couple of years ago, the president joked about the number of government agencies involved in regulating salmon. But such things account for a microscopic share of the budget. Getting off our unsustainable fiscal path requires tax increases or spending cuts – or both – that affect the middle class.

"It's math," the president has said on many occasions. OK, it's time for him to teach some budget math. In the style of a great math teacher, Jaime Escalante, he needs to stand and deliver.

If he can do that, he may find the way easier for everything else.

John J. Pitney Jr. is the Roy P. Crocker professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and coauthor of "American Government and Politics: Deliberation, Democracy, and Citizenship."

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