The Smithian

“It’s a tension,” David Axelrod, Obama’s longtime political adviser, said. “…you don’t want to be presumptuous in assuming a second term. But campaigns are about the future, and there is an imperative to spell out where we’re going.” Obama has an ambitious second-term agenda, which, at least in broad ways, his campaign is beginning to highlight. The President has said that the most important policy he could address in his second term is climate change, one of the few issues that he thinks could fundamentally improve the world decades from now. He also is concerned with containing nuclear proliferation.

from the New Yorker’s new “The Second Term: What would Obama do if reëlected?”

more.