In the annals of misbegotten diplomacy, though a far cry from Donald Rumsfeld’s handshake with Saddam Hussein in 1983, Hillary Clinton would probably like to take back the moment, in March, 2009, when she handed a big, red plastic button to her Russian counterpart, foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and invited him to join her in pressing “reset.” As it turned out, someone at the State Department had botched the translation, and the gag gift read, in Cyrillic, “overloaded” or “overcharged.” Cue the forced smiles.

If there is a reset button out there, President Obama might like to get his hands on it. At his pre-holiday press conference, White House correspondents provided a grim recap of the past year: Edward Snowden and the N.S.A. leaks, the fumbling of healthcare.gov, falling approval ratings, a legislative agenda that could be described in the same terms that John Cleese, of “Monty Python,” once applied to a parrot. Whether or not 2013 was actually, as a reporter suggested in a question, Obama’s “worst year” in office, you know it was pretty bad if its highlight—the golden moment when everything seemed to fall into place for the White House—was the government shutdown. No wonder Obama declared himself “eager to skip town” and spend time, under the Hawaiian sun, reflecting on what he “can do better next year.”

To be fair to the President, we all try to recharge and refocus around this time of year. (“Be fair to the President” is not among the New Year’s resolutions of the Washington press corps, who are mostly certain that the remainder of Obama’s term is a hopeless case.) It’s an appealing and very American notion—the fresh start, the clean slate, the second (or third, or sixth) act. Steve Jobs got one after he was forced out of Apple. Peyton Manning is enjoying one right now, setting passing and scoring records not long after being cut by the Colts. Senator John McCain—left for dead, politically, in 2000 and 2008—may be undergoing a revival. “I’ve probably gone through about twenty-five, twenty-six,” he recently joked to Mark Leibovich of the Times. Obama himself might be nearing that threshold: “This room has probably recorded at least fifteen near-death experiences,” he said at his press conference.

But can one actually reboot a Presidency? All Administrations have their ups and downs, their oscillations of fortune; but can the ups be engineered? And, if so, by what means?

The staff reshuffle is a frequent resort. A hope persists, despite generally poor results, that new blood cures all. On his appointment as chief of staff, in 1987, Howard Baker was hailed as a certain “savior” of the ailing Reagan Administration, which had been hobbled by the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan’s long convalescence after abdominal surgery, and a perp-walk parade of senior officials facing ethics charges. Within six months, Baker was blamed for virtually the whole mess. In mid-1993, a veteran of that same White House, David Gergen, got the call from Bill Clinton, who was beset by failed nominations, a flap over the firings of travel-office personnel, prolonged embarrassment over an expensive haircut, and carping by centrist Democrats that the White House was listing leftward. Gergen’s charge was to provide a voice of moderation as well as adult supervision for inexperienced staff. His tenure was stormy and brief. The same can be said of William Daley’s time as Obama’s chief of staff, from 2011 until 2012.

Cautionary tales aside, Obama is fortunate that John Podesta has agreed to come onboard as a special adviser. Podesta—as I saw firsthand when he was the chief of staff in the Clinton White House—is, indeed, a “great strategist,” as Obama has called him, and one with a well-developed playbook for this point in a Presidency. Will Obama empower him to use it? Both men, surely, would acknowledge that shifts in personnel mean little unless they portend shifts in strategy. In this sense, and only in this sense, Clinton’s initially clandestine partnership with the strategist Dick Morris, beginning in the wake of the 1994 midterm debacle, might be a model. Working with Morris, Clinton took the offensive on “values” and seized the middle ground between the two parties. “It wasn’t pretty, but it was what was needed,” a former Clinton senior staffer told me recently. “The only thing that works is a rigorous, sharp-eyed focus on what ails a Presidency. It’s almost never about optics or messaging or communications.”

For Obama, it’s possible that 2014 will bring, as Politico predicts, a newly “forceful, unapologetic and occasionally provocative application of White House power.” As well it should. December’s budget deal aside, it’s become clear that reasoning with the Republican Party will not work for Obama; and, while he took a long time to accept that fact, he seems increasingly determined to speak—plainly and even defiantly—about his convictions. His speeches on income inequality, in particular, show a clarity of purpose that was too often lacking during his first term.

Yet his follow-through, as ever, remains to be seen. He has promised forceful executive action before: in 2011, he launched a campaign called We Can’t Wait. “Where [Congress] won’t act,” Obama pledged, “I will.” Except where he didn’t, or couldn’t. On immigration reform, for example, or on gun control, neither of which can be addressed to any meaningful degree by fiat. We Can’t Wait petered out after a year or so, along with, it appears, Obama’s belief in its premise. At a fundraiser in November, he shut down a supporter who was yelling “Executive action!” the way stoned concertgoers call for “Freebird.” “A lot of people have been saying this lately on every problem,” Obama explained, quieting the crowd. “ ‘Sign an executive order and we can pretty much do anything and basically nullify Congress.’ … That’s not how it works. … There’s no shortcut to democracy.”

Obama may have other strategic shifts up his sleeve. And, like his former opponent McCain, if he sticks around long enough the pendulum will probably swing back in his favor. But a reset, reboot, or rebirth of a more enduring nature remains elusive. As Obama will surely reflect upon on his long flight back to Washington this weekend, he’s returning to the same stalemate in Congress, the same unhinged Republican opposition, the same clucking about his competence, and the likelihood that, with the midterm elections fast approaching, it’s all going to get worse before it has a chance to get better. If there’s a reset button to be found, it’s in the same locked cabinet as the silver bullet and the magic wand.

_Jeff Shesol, a former speechwriter for President Clinton, is the author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt vs. the Supreme Court” and is a partner at West Wing Writers. Follow him on Twitter at