WASHINGTON, Jan 23 (AFP) - US President George W. Bush faces a difficult second term but he could escape the scandals that embroiled many predecessors who stayed more than four years in the White House, experts said.
"There is a risk of scandal in the second term," noted David Gergen, who worked in the administrations of former presidents Bill Clinton, George Bush senior, Gerald Ford and Richard Nixon.
But Bush "has tried to guard himself against scandal in a very creative way, that is: don't put anyone around you that you don't know," David Corbin, professor at the University of New Hampshire, told AFP.
"They've been an insular White House thus far, and if anything, they'll be that much more of an insular White House in the second term. So my guess is no, I wouldn't expect there to arise any of these scandals as you saw in the second terms of the other presidents."
"The problem for (Ronald) Reagan and Clinton is that they had people around them that they didn't know," Corbin added.
At least since Franklin D. Roosevelt in the mid-twentieth century, many presidents have been touched by scandal, most of all Nixon, brought down by the Watergate political spying affair that led to his resignation.
Fifteen years later Reagan was compromised by the Iran-Contra scandal, in which his administration secretly sold arms to Iran and funneled the proceeds to rebels fighting the leftist government of Nicaragua.
A dozen years on, Congress impeached, tried and acquitted Clinton for lying about his adulterous affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
During Bush's first term the scent of scandal wafted over Washington due to links Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney had with oil companies prior to their arrival in the White House. No solid proof of wrongdoing emerged, however.
"A scandal is often the product of hubris. It is sort of the rules don't apply to us, we're sort of above it," Gergen said recently on the public television station PBS.
"You come into a second term and you almost feel like you're infallible," former White House chief of staff under Reagan, Ken Duberstein, said on the same program.
The hubris can also be manifested in an overly ambitious agenda, when "you're a lame duck in the eyes of others," Gergen said.
Bush has set out wide-reaching plans for his second term. On the domestic front, he wants to get to work on issues that have been neglected, from retirement pensions to immigration to energy policy.
"He has an ambitious legislative program, and I don't know what's going to happen with it," said Eric Davis, a political science professor at Middlebury College in Vermont, pointing in particular to animated debate in Bush's own Republican camp over reforming the government's retirement pension plan.
In foreign affairs, Bush has set sights on no less than "to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world," according to his inaugural speech Thursday.
"The greatest pitfall is trying to craft policy that lives up to his understanding of freedom," Corbin said.
On all fronts, according to Davis, "there's a lot of potential pitfall for him in the next six to 12 months. He can avoid them if he changes his policies, but that's most unlikely. I think he's going to run into substantial opposition both at home and abroad."
01/23/2005 08:48 GMT - AFP