On Non Lame-Duckedness

Barack Obama Is Not a Lame Duck Until the Votes Are Tallied:

Let us be honest with our colloquialisms. The president will not be a "lame duck" until after the election results are tallied in November. You cannot lame-duck him eight months before that. By attempting to do that, you are failing in your duty not only to the Constitution, but also to the catechism of political cliche, which is something up with which I will not put.

And even then, history tells us, the incumbent president can still do stuff. For example, there were no lamer ducks at the end of their presidencies than Lyndon Johnson in the autumn of 1968 and John Adams in the autumn of 1800. Even then, LBJ, by sheer force of being LBJ, and because Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King had been murdered by firearms earlier that year, managed to get Congress to pass a bipartisan gun-control law at the end of October of his final year in office...