The insiders realize an administration has entered its terminal decline when they notice that foreign diplomats and senior journalists take a decidedly more relaxed view of their pronouncements than once they did. The invitations to the large receptions still come, but the intimate, probing lunches and dinners grow fewer. Your views are met neither with anxiety, nor urgent efforts to dissuade, but with a benign tolerance bordering on indifference. What is worse, you begin to notice that the foreigners are wining and dining advisers either to the opposition party or (worse in some ways) to the candidate of the incumbent party. The latter group—your former colleagues—have begun carefully but publicly edging away from the policies you and they once made together, and to blame you for having screwed them up.

An administration in its last year resembles a small woodland creature reaching the end of its life, seeking only a quiet burrow in which to meet its demise. Like that moribund animal, an administration will exhibit pointless twitches of frantic activity before the very end. These mostly involve extensive foreign travel to nice or particularly interesting places, which gets you away from the polite yawns of Congressmen and Senators (and worse, their staffs) that meet your opinions back home. But sooner or later you return to Washington, and there realize that your unglamorous duty consists chiefly in leaving the dog’s breakfast of a policy in the least-desperate shape you can for the next team.

Some officials, even the President, yield to delusions of major accomplishments still remaining. This is a particularly dangerous temptation for the woodland creature, whose stock of vital energy is dwindling steadily. In the final year of an administration an uneven team stumbles and bumbles more and more. The limbs are no longer coordinated, if ever they were. Everyone is exhausted. It is a bad time to try new things, particularly when it has sunken in, to friend and foe alike, that your time remaining is limited. A dying administration’s threats, like its promises, do not carry much weight, and for the same reason. Its increasingly strident defenses of itself convince no one—even some of those making them.