It happens after every presidential election. Winners and losers pledge to quit the partisan bickering and seek consensus for the common good. And it’s happening now, as President Bush and Sen. John Kerry call for the cessation of hostilities and the onset of national healing.

Don’t expect the good vibes to last very long. Politics in this era is a 24/7 exercise; the liberal Web sites and talk shows and grass-roots networkers will refuel for the long haul. Bush’s bold ambitions will be grist for controversy as he seeks to steer them through the disputatious democratic process.

Bush is buoyed by his party’s control of Congress, and by his having vanquished his foe with record turnout. He’ll have momentum – at least until his demoralized opponents regroup, and until unforeseen events intrude – as he pursues his legacy.

And it’s a daunting agenda for a lame duck, because it’s about rebuking the New Deal and Great Society. It’s about redefining the role of government in people’s lives, by overhauling Social Security and the tax code (although he’s coy on key specifics). In short, it’s an attempt to break the second-term jinx that has bedeviled every president over the last seven decades.

Even Franklin D. Roosevelt – the last president, before Bush, to win a second term while simultaneously expanding his party’s majorities on Capitol Hill – had the jinx. His domestic agenda went nowhere, he tried to pack the Supreme Court with extra judges, and his party was clobbered in the 1938 congressional races.

Dwight Eisenhower, in his second term, was undercut by a recession, heart problems and citizens’ fears that Sputnik, the Soviet satellite, would give the communists an edge in the Cold War. In the 1970s, Richard Nixon had Watergate. In the 1980s, Ronald Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton trimmed his ambitions by adopting Republican policies, and, as for scandals … you know how that went.

Steven Schier, a Minnesota-based political analyst who has edited a book on Bush’s governing style, said: “Traditionally, a second-term president becomes increasingly irrelevant. But Bush wants to test the boundaries of the possible, and, as we all know by now, his people are very good at what they do. Anyone at this point who still thinks Bush is an idiot is really being stupid.”

And George Edwards, a presidential historian based in Texas, said of Bush: “This guy is a revolutionary. He wants big change. He has always sought to be a president of consequence, for better or worse. And right now he seems well-positioned to be one.”

That’s partly because the opposition is depleted, particularly in the Senate. The liberal Democratic senators may be increasingly marginalized; the danger for the party, as moderate Democratic analyst Marshall Wittmann put it, is that it will have a tougher time transcending its base of African-Americans and “highly educated white women who read the New Yorker.”

But ambitious presidents have been thwarted before. After Lyndon Johnson completed John F. Kennedy’s first term and won with 60 percent of the vote, he fell victim to Vietnam and his own hubris, his domestic agenda waned, and the political landscape shifted beneath his feet. Today, many observers say Bush could hurt himself by overreaching – and that, by declaring on Thursday that “the people have spoken,” he was forgetting the 55 million who spoke in opposition.

Edwards said: “It’s nonsense to believe that he has a great mandate. A mandate is when an overwhelming percentage of people support you, as well as your issues. Reagan won by 20 points in 1984 – that’s a mandate. Bush won by three. In 1976, when Jimmy Carter won by two, nobody said he had a mandate. So why say that Bush has one, when Kerry had the (polling) edge on virtually all domestic issues, and when a majority of people didn’t like Bush’s handling of Iraq?”

Though the public may still be divided, the government is not. The augmented Republican congressional majorities can grease the wheels for his agenda. Republicans will hold all the hearings, and set the timetables. And if there’s a whiff of second-term scandal (the bane of so many second-term presidents), the Republicans on the Hill are likely to snuff it, rather than investigate it.

As for Democrats, they clearly intend to find their voice and craft an alternative message; they now have a few liberal think tanks, although they’re at least 20 years behind the conservatives on that front. For the moment, Democrats seem to be saying that their best hope is for the Bush forces to fail. Strategist Jenny Backus cited what she called “the Republican fatal flaw of hubris … They always go too far in their need to dominate, and end up alienating people.”

Given Bush’s record – governing in 2001 as if he had a mandate, and getting his tax cuts and scoring big gains in the 2002 congressional races by painting Democrats as soft on terrorism – any expectations of failure might be unrealistic. But, looking ahead, there are enough potential pitfalls to chasten even some Bush enthusiasts. As conservative operative Joel Rosenberg said: “Let’s not kid ourselves. Round Two in office for President Bush could be dramatically more difficult than Round One.”

Rosenberg was alluding to international wild cards: the challenge of “pacifying” Iraq and the ever-rising costs of the venture, and Bush’s need to deal with a nuclear North Korea and prevent a nuclear Iran. He was also referring to the inevitable showdown over the ailing and aging U.S. Supreme Court, with Bush poised to name new conservative judges and the Democratic interest groups girding for an ideological donnybrook.

On another key domestic front, Bush has never said how he would finance the estimated $1 trillion “transitional costs” of partially privatizing Social Security and allowing workers to divert some of their payroll taxes into private accounts. He was invited to do so during the debates, but declined. Congressional experts say that many House members in both parties are nervous about such sweeping reform, particularly since they have to face the voters in two years.

Nor did he offer specifics, during the campaign, about his plan to radically simplify the tax code – a top priority on the second-term agenda. But experts say that’s politically troublesome – and therefore tough to enact – because tax reform always creates winners and losers. A Treasury Department study concluded in 2002 that tax simplification would effectively lower taxes for the rich and hike it for others.

But Bush has repeatedly demonstrated that he is not deterred by obstacles; unlike second-termer Clinton, who adopted Republican positions on welfare and the budget to sustain short-term popularity, Bush seems more determined to play out his time by thinking big and daring the Democrats to resist. As he vowed as a candidate four years ago: “We will write not footnotes, but chapters in the American story.”

All told, said Bush-watcher Schier, “they know they have a window of limited duration, and they’ll try to jam as much as they can right through it. They’re in office to shake things up. We’re in for very interesting times.”

And, as the Bush legacy unfolds, the times will be spiced by the next crop of presidential prospects. John McCain is due in New Hampshire in two weeks, and a Republican poll says Rudolph Giuliani is tops among GOP primary voters for 2008. And so it begins.

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