HOW HE SEES IT Bush should beware 'second term hex'

By JIM WRIGHT
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"hu-bris" (hyoo'bris), n. excessive pride or self-confidence, arrogance; offensive display of superiority or self-importance.
Second-term presidents have been peculiarly vulnerable to the delusion that re-election has immunized them from disagreement or that it demands obedience to their whims.
Some, to their own detriment, have succumbed to an expansive assumption that the voters gave them license to do whatever they wished.
Call it the "second term hex."
President Bush and his House and Senate party leaders would be well-advised not to presume that the 51 percent election victory in November amounted to a "mandate" for each of their pet projects and theories.
Think of several presidents who won actual landslide victories, and of the rejections that buffeted them in their second terms when they stretched too far the elastic presumption of public anointment.
The biggest, most overwhelming re-election majorities of the 20th century went to Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
Each of these suffered his own deeply embarrassing comeuppance when he tried to ride the wave of personal popularity like a roughshod cowboy in the saddle.
Roosevelt's effort to pack the Supreme Court and thus bend it to his will came a-cropper when a cranky old Texas congressman named Hatton Sumners dug in behind his battlement as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee and said, "No!"
Senators like presidential loyalist Alben Barkley joined to doom FDR's court-packing plan as well as his overly ambitious government reorganization scheme.
Legislators resented the popular president's efforts to use his magnetism to circumvent the legislative branch or to win its assistance in transforming the judicial branch in his own image.
In a separate way, voters who adored FDR, supported his New Deal and repeatedly voted for him took umbrage when he tried to purge their own elected, homegrown senators.
FDR rebuffed
Stung by what he considered the obstructionism of Democratic senators like Walter George of Georgia and Millard Tyding of Maryland, Roosevelt appealed to voters in their states to replace them. Voters chose instead to re-elect these senators, rebuffing their beloved president for misconstruing the extent of the mandate they'd given him.
Johnson got more of his domestic agenda -- the Great Society -- approved by Congress than anyone save perhaps Roosevelt, but he lamented to biographer Doris Kearns that his troubles began when he turned aside from his "true love" (the Great Society) to follow after "that bitch of a war" in Vietnam.
A legislative craftsman who understood congressional rules and traditions probably better than any other chief executive, LBJ, always in a hurry, sometimes overreached in trying to speed up passage of his favorite projects.
Once Johnson asked House Public Works Chairman George Fallon to do a wholly unprecedented thing. Johnson wanted to short-cut procedures on the highway beautification bill by simply clipping and patching provisions from a copy of the previous day's Congressional Record, pasting them onto a bill form and reporting it to the floor with no committee discussion.
Highhanded tactics
Johnson quite understandably wanted to deliver a showy victory to please his wife, whose personal brainchild highway beautification was. His highhanded tactics, unfortunately, irritated some of those in Congress on whom he'd have to rely for other parts of his ambitious agenda.
The unwinnable Vietnam War, which Johnson mostly inherited, also contributed to gumming up the works for his two immediate successors.
Richard Nixon, after smashing George McGovern in 1972, felt ordained to do whatever he chose in order to get his way in Vietnam. Clandestinely using the FBI, CIA and IRS to spy on, punish and harass private citizens for the sin of disagreeing with him was Nixon's chief undoing.
So heavy were Nixon's assumptions of a sort of divine right concerning Vietnam that critics branded his an "imperial presidency." He had mistaken his second inauguration for a coronation.
Even the pleasant, popular Reagan, after his impressive second-term victory over Walter Mondale, fell afoul of at least six laws when his secret-war cronies began making their own rules and then systematically shredded the evidence of what they'd done.
When the flagrant Iran-Contra scandals, born of excessive zeal, erupted upon the public consciousness like volcanic lava, they left an ugly scar on Reagan's presidency.
Election victors, take heed. It would behoove us all on both sides, perhaps, to accompany our succulent holiday dinners this year with at least one medium-sized serving of humble pie.
X Jim Wright is a former speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.