President Barack Obama's second term has hit some major snags: Syria, the government shutdown, the NSA scandal, and the health care law's rocky rollout.
But history shows us he's not alone in suffering some second term blues. One historian says that only seven second-term presidents "avoided a troubled or failed second term."
John Nichols, Washington correspondent for The Nation, says the second term is always the test of a presidency.
"The first term is situational," he said. "People are getting to know you, you're coming in on the heels of the last guy. All that ends with the second term - the second term is about reality. You're the president of the United States; you have no excuses."
On The Daily Circuit we look back at presidential second terms and what Obama can do to turn his around.
LEARN MORE ABOUT PRESIDENTIAL TERMS:
• Obama's healthcare missteps could scuttle his second term
And certainly that concern has now been reinforced by the president's admission that his repeated assurances that no one's healthcare coverage would be disrupted was simply wrong. Enemies of healthcare reform have pounced, saying the president told a lie worse than Nixon's Watergate cover-up or George W. Bush's claims about Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction. That's crazy, of course, but, even if it wasn't a lie of historic proportions, it was a tactical manipulation of the facts that someone in the Obama administration had to know was not at all the whole truth. (LA Times)
• Obama's Second Term: Worse Than George W. Bush's?
It's still too early to make a judgment on how Obama's presidency will unfold. Getting the health exchanges up and running by the end of the month as promised would be a good sign. But the true test of Obama's second term will come when enrollment figures are tallied in March. Without 7 million people signing up, Obamacare could well collapse under its own weight. (Fiscal Times)
• Romney: Obamacare fiasco "rotting" Obama's second term "First of all, the Massachusetts experience was a state-run plan. The right way to deal with health care reform is not to have a one-size-fits-all plan that's imposed on all the states," he explained. "And there's some other differences. In Massachusetts, we phased in the requirements so that there was a slow rollout. That way you could test the systems as you went along to make sure there wouldn't be glitches." But the president's biggest mistake, Romney said, was telling Americans they could keep their plans if they liked them. (CBS News)