Obama's promising start to 2015 is for real

Barack Obama does not want to be doomed to the second-term struggles and haplessness of George W. Bush. And the stars seem to be aligning for Obama. Mars is in retrograde.

The president's approval rating was in the cellar late last year, when the president himself broke the news of his long-secret negotiation with the Cuban government. Around the same time, he announced a plan to give work permits to nearly five million undocumented immigrants who would otherwise face deportation.

It seemed like a deliberate one-two punch, a way to counter the impression that the president intended to coast for the remainder of his term. But the truth was different: Obama had been working on the Cuba deal for years, and when all parties — including the pope — believed it was time to go public, la arrisegada politica was over. And immigration? Obama erred in waiting this long, according to half his party. (The rest think he's made a mistake.) He's long promised to do what he did. So while timing does matter in politics, Obama's post-midterm vigor was arguably just a matter of happenstance.

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This week, though, Obama gets to use timing as a weapon. Republican control of Congress has not produced any whiz-bang moments so far — not even the extended work-week promised by new Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Instead, congressional leaders are tending to the party's base, focusing their time on, say, abortion.

Almost no one expected the president to propose a seven percent boost in discretionary spending. Nothing makes blood pump faster through Democrats than a big bounce in spending. Next week, he's giving the State of the Union, so he'll have everyone's attention by default. He's announcing more reforms to the National Security Agency's surveillance practices, too.

The economy is growing at a pace where wages are beginning to grow for average Americans, thanks in part to low gas prices. And more than half of Americans think the economy is moving in the right direction.

These are the fundamentals Obama faces: an increasingly strong economy, Americans who generally like him as a person, Republicans who haven't figured out how to lead, a Republican presidential field that is figuring out how to appeal to the middle class, and a renewed sense of optimism. He's free from the constraint of having to please the alternate masters of a Democratic Congress, which, paradoxically, is why he can propose a budget increase that might well have garnered Democratic support back in the day. With these givens, it's less likely that he'll try to save his presidency by making some sort of grand or rash gesture, as these historians seem to want him to do.

The big unknowns:

* Health care reform. People seem to like their coverage. And Americans aren't as worried about the burden of health care costs, which, if you think about it, is sort of amazing. There's no way to spin this as an artifact of positive media coverage, since the coverage of the Affordable Care Act outside of liberal partisan channels has been neutral to negative. So far, the law seems to be working.

* A sudden economic cratering. This is what doomed President George W. Bush. It's hard to see that happening again in the next two years.

* ISIS, terrorism, and Syria. And Iran. Let's lump these foreign policy dilemmas together. Iran and the U.S. are haggling over a nuclear deal. Many members of Congress (Democrats included) think Iran is getting the better end of the negotiations and are pressing for more sanctions. There will almost certainly (sadly) be incidents of terrorism in the United States, and Obama will be blamed or credit for his response to them. What happens in France, and how it affects global counter-terrorism policy from here on out, is unknown and unknowable. ISIS seems to be gaining ground, despite significant U.S. involvement.

Any or all of these could conspire to raise questions about Obama's leadership skills, about which a small minority of Americans are skeptical.

But as 2015 moves along, Obama's strengths are not illusory.