If Obama wins, what would he do in a second term?

By Ezra Klein, WashPost, Published: May 4

“In a second term,” Mitt Romney darkly warned in a speech to the National Rifle Association last month, President Obama “would be unrestrained by the demands of reelection.”

But Romney was cagey about what, exactly, that would mean: His only specific prediction was that Obama would “remake” the Supreme Court. So it was helpful when, at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner a week ago, the president opened up about the “secret agenda” he has planned. “In my first term,” he joked, “we ended the war in Iraq; in my second term, I will win the war on Christmas. . . . In my first term, we passed health-care reform; in my second term, I guess I’ll pass it again.”

In other speeches, Obama has offered a more serious preview of what he’d like to get done if he’s reelected. On March 30, he listed second-term priorities including reforming the immigration system; remaking the nation’s energy policy so it addresses “the long-term challenges. . . . of energy independence and climate change”; doing more to ensure that “people who don’t have work can find work” and that “our housing system is working for everybody”; pushing forward on education reform; and executing an “effective transition out of Afghanistan.”

But that’s not really a list of what Obama would do in his second term. It’s a list of what he would like to do.

(More here.)