146 pages Brookings Institution Press  (Washington) Publication Date: April 2007 Paperback ISBN: 978-0-8157-2884-9

George W. Bush has a bad case of the second-term blues. The symptoms--common among American second-term presidents--include hubris, burnout, a paucity of new ideas, scandal, party infighting, little legislative success, and a loss of seats in the midterm election. In Second-Term Blues, John C. Fortier and Norman J. Ornstein lead a stellar cast of political analysts in examining how Bush has governed and how his presidency has changed during a tumultuous second go-round.

While the media obsess over who will be elected, they rarely ask how a candidate would manage if elected. In this in-depth analysis of Bush's second term, shrewd observers of U.S. politics look at how the forty-third president has governed as well as the results. David Sanger and Carla Anne Robbins, both of the New York Times, analyze Bush's foreign policy, revealing how it defines and restricts his presidency and how he has been forced to reshape his grand foreign policy vision. Dan Balz, political reporter with the Washington Post, dissects America's changing political mood and considers how the president's ambitious agenda has suffered a reality check. Presidential scholar Charles O. Jones of the Brookings Institution examines how Bush's governing style resembles that of a corporate executive, while Fred Greenstein of Princeton University (The Hidden-Hand Presidency) considers his effectiveness as a leader.

Second-Term Blues traces Bush's governing through foreign and domestic issues, in relation to his first term and to the second terms of other presidents. This hard-hitting book illuminates the priorities, governing tendencies, and leadership style of George W. Bush as he navigates a rocky second term.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a columnist for The Hill. He is the author of Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils (AEI, 2006).

Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is the author or editor of numerous books, most recently The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track, written with Thomas E. Mann (Oxford University Press, 2006).