With the mid-term elections, always perilous for first-term Presidents, less than three months away, he is struggling to break the deadlock over the crime bill in the House of Representatives.

For a first-term President, there's a lot on his plate.

What if, at some point in the not-too-distant future, a first-term President finds himself frustrated over the long-running Nicaragua problem and the stalemate that has resulted from Congressional obstruction of his predecessor's programs for dealing with it?

And yet the first-term congressman isn't completely happy with the first-term President.

There were more than 90 votes among House Democrats for the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, when lawmakers were loath to oppose a first-term President.

There will be even greater interest in Mr. Dole's case because if elected, he would enter the White House at age 73, the oldest first-term President in American history.

He describes a first-term President who refused to meet with his top foreign policy and intelligence advisers, and eventually adopted a policy, dominated by human rights concerns, that was fashionable without being sensible - and would later have to be abandoned.

Realistic historians will remember Ronald Reagan as a near-great first-term President who tired and faded in the stretch.

You can't get much more blunt with a first-term President of your own party without handing him his hat on TV.