One year into his presidential term Obama told Diane Sawyer in an ABC news interview that he’d rather be a good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.
Really?
Does anyone really expect that a guy who spent hundreds of millions of dollars to win a position for which he was totally unqualified would take counsel of his modesty and admit that the nation’s commonweal would be served best by his foregoing a second term? How can anyone believe that barnyard refuse? Obama’s first term achievements include an unpopular healthcare law that 8% more people want repealed than want it retained; an economy that’s underwater with record deficits, debt, and an anemic 1.9% growth; unemployment that’s over 8% (if you don’t count the people who’ve quit looking or have taken part-time jobs, in which case it’s over 11%); a country on the wrong track according to 60% of Americans, and a job performance disapproval rating of over 48% … does that qualify for a mediocre first term? What hope for change would a second term offer? Yet, Obama wants four more years to complete his “unfinished project,” as he described his first term in a recent fundraiser. One can only guess and gasp at what four more years of this would look like – if there will be anything left to look at in 2016.
Gerald Ford, the only person to be both Vice President and President without being elected to either office, wanted more – election to a “second” term. History remembers him as the man who pardoned Richard Nixon whom Ford replaced in the Watergate Scandal. The country rewarded him with the shortest tenure of any President who didn’t die in office by choosing instead Jimmy Carter, whose fecklessness doomed him to a one-term presidency.
William Howard Taft, the 27th President, whose claim to fame was giving us the income tax, wanted a second term. But his predecessor, fellow Republican Teddy Roosevelt, was displeased with his protégé’s first term and ran against him for the Republican nomination. Failing to win the nomination, Roosevelt ran as a third party candidate, split the anti-Democrat vote, and thereby threw the election to Woodrow Wilson, who won with less than 42% of the vote. Wilson, formerly the president of Princeton University and the only President to hold a Ph.D., gave us modern political liberalism. He only narrowly won a second term during which he suffered a stroke that left him blind and paralyzed on his left side. His wife Edith was the de facto President for the remaining 18 months of his second term. Although legally allowed to run for additional terms, wiser heads knew he wasn’t physically up to it. Moreover, the country had its fill of Wilson’s policies and gave the Republicans a landslide victory in 1920, delivering to them the Congress and the White House.
Grover Cleveland is the only person to hold the presidency twice in non-consecutive terms. He was a one-term President, who lost to Benjamin Harrison, a one-term President who lost to Grover Cleveland, thus making Cleveland the 22nd and 24th President. Even with a second chance, Cleveland couldn’t quite get the “president” thing right and was tossed out again after only one term. Talk about rejection! Ulysses Grant, the 18th President, almost pulled off a “Grover Cleveland” by serving two consecutive terms, after which he lost to Rutherford B. Hayes, who voluntarily stepped down after one term. Grant’s name was put into the nomination process for a third non-consecutive term, but after 36 ballots in the 1880 Republican Convention, the nomination went to James Garfield – although barely so. Garfield became the 20th president and the second to be assassinated in office, six months into his first term.
James K. Polk, the 11th President, was the only other person – besides Rutherford Hayes – to promise to serve one term and keep his promise. Unlike Hayes, who was a terrible President, Polk had a very productive solitary term.
When the delegates to the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to create the document by which to govern the Republic, their initial proposal for the presidential term was a single seven-year term. Yet everyone in the room revered George Washington, who presided in silence over their Convention, and all knew he would likely be elected the first President. With Washington in mind, therefore, the delegates decided that the President should serve four year terms with no restriction on the number of terms.
Washington served two terms and declined in 1796 to seek a third. When he left office in 1797, he had served over eight years as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army and eight years as President of the new republic. He was 65 – an old man for that time – and he wished to retire in peace to his plantation home, Mount Vernon, where he would die two years later. His forbearance to serve only two terms imposed itself as the traditional limit on Washington’s 30 successors. Only eight were fortunate enough to win election twice, including Cleveland, thereby conforming to Washington’s tradition – that is, until the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt, a man unrestrained by the conceit of his indispensability and who held the presidency as a monarch, much like its current incumbent. FDR was elected four times and served a record 4,422 days in office before being stuck down three months into his fourth term with a cerebral hemorrhage while visiting his personal retreat in Warm Springs, Georgia with his paramour of almost 30 years, Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Eleanor Roosevelt was in Washington.
Of the 43 men who held the office of President before Obama, 12 served only one term and 13 served two terms, including Cleveland, whose terms were not consecutive, and Roosevelt, who served three and part of a fourth. Four died in office – William Harrison, Taylor, Harding, and Franklin Roosevelt – and four – Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy – were assassinated while in office, two of whom were in their second term. Of the eight Vice Presidents who succeeded upon presidential deaths, four filled the remaining term of their successor and won one term on their own and four did not. Ford, who became President upon Nixon’s resignation, was never elected to the office. One could say, then, judging from historical statistics, that the chance of a second term is about 50%, if not less.
Harry Truman completed Roosevelt’s fourth term – almost four years of it – and won election for another four years. He was the last person who could have been elected to even more terms. But after losing the New Hampshire primary in 1952, he pulled out of the race for the Democrat nomination, which Adlai Stevenson won. During his presidential campaign, a woman reportedly called out to Stevenson, “You have the vote of every thinking person!” Stevenson allegedly replied, “That’s not enough, madam. We need a majority.” A Republican won the 1952 general election for President – Dwight Eisenhower.
The Republicans also won control of both houses of Congress in the mid-term elections following the death of Roosevelt, and they were determined that no future President would repeat his monarchical feat. As Republican Representative Ellsworth Buck put it, "Dictatorships are spawned by the repeated election of one man." The 22nd Amendment was passed, which said, inter alia:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
Article V of the Constitution requires the legislatures of three-fourths of the states to ratify constitutional amendments. Since Truman was serving as the President, he was grandfathered in when the 22nd Amendment was ratified by the 36th of 48 states in February 1951.
During the House Judiciary Committee hearings for the Amendment, Representative Emanuel Celler, the ranking Committee Democrat, argued in favor of a different amendment which would allow Presidents to serve one six-year presidential term "with no right of reelection." The motion was defeated in Committee. Celler tried again when the vote went to the House floor and it was again defeated.
The idea of a single six-year term has been floated several times throughout the years but has oddly never gained traction. Yet Celler’s argument for it is sound:
It has always been natural for the incumbent president to have his eyes fixed on reelection, and all acts of the first term, directly or indirectly, in some measure are affected by the ambition for a second term.
Years earlier Republican Senator Elihu Root made a similar argument, relating his cabinet experiences first as President McKinley's Secretary of War and later the Secretary of State for President Theodore Roosevelt who followed McKinley’s assassination.
… the possibility of renomination and reelection of a President who is in office seriously interferes with the working of our governmental machinery during the last two years of his term [since] just about the time he gets to the point of highest efficiency, people in the Senate and in the House begin to figure how to try to beat him [and] you cannot separate the attempt to beat the individual from the attempt to make ineffective the operations of government which that individual is carrying on in accordance with his duty.
The outsized egos of modern-day presidents combine with the lure of a second term to produce perverse incentives in governing as Celler and Root observed. To win the presidency is an honor which only 44 men have accomplished in the 224-year history of the Republic. To be rejected for a second term after voters have seen the consequences of a first term is humiliating even though history has shown it happens slightly more than half the time. But look at any list of “best presidents” and there won’t be a one-termer on it.
In such a system, the motivation is to go all out during the first term and show your best shots so voters will be crying “More! More!” when it’s time for a second term. But again, the lessons of history do not bode well for second terms. A second term President is a lame duck on day one. Legacies almost won in the first term are often lost in the mismanagement of the second.
I haven’t the space to catalog every second-term fiasco, but consider these.
George Washington stumbled several times in his second term. For example, his Treasury Secretary, Alexander Hamilton, precipitated the Whiskey Rebellion in western Pennsylvania by imposing a war debt tax on grain sold in the form of whiskey. The Revolution had been partly fought over issues involving taxes and this one was keenly resented. When frontier negotiations with farmers failed, Washington called out the state militias and rode at the head of their column of 15,000 men to put down the tax protest. The symbolism was awful. The Father of the Country was behaving as an imperial bully against his own countrymen. Several men were sentenced to hang. Anxious to paint over the public relations disaster, Washington pardoned them. President Jefferson later repealed the tax.
Thomas Jefferson's Embargo Act of 1807, approved by Congress in his second term, is considered one of the worst presidential decisions ever made. The Napoleonic Wars in Europe were fully underway and Britain and France were at each other’s throats. To discourage trading with each other’s enemy, both countries passed laws that made merchant ships fair game for one country if they traded with the other – i.e. Britain or France. It was a Catch-22 for America. Even though our country had declared its neutrality, Jefferson responded with an embargo of his own that prevented American ships from trading with either country and prevented either country from shipping cargo to an American port. Europe had an unusually large food harvest in 1807 so the embargo hurt only the American side of trans-Atlantic trade. Shortages of English and European goods drove up domestic prices and Congress repealed the Act just as Jefferson was leaving office. His successor, James Madison, was left with a time bomb that would lead to the War of 1812, consuming most of Madison’s second term.
Andrew Jackson’s second term was marred by the Nullification Crisis, which could have plunged the country into civil war when South Carolina and the federal government faced off over a burdensome tariff. Jackson’s second term was further marred by the relocation of Cherokees in the Trail of Tears tragedy. Jackson’s longstanding hatred of banks, especially the Bank of the United States, led to a severe economic recession in 1837 as he was leaving office.
Presidential second-term disasters in the modern era would certainly recall Woodrow Wilson beginning his second term by breaking his promise not to thrust Americans into the European war that would come to be known as World War I. His failure to engage Republicans in his Treaty of Versailles and the creation of the League of Nations assured their defeat and the loss of Congress and the White House. Wilson’s second-term policies created the Depression of 1920 with 12% unemployment. The stress of his second-term miscalculations produced the catastrophic stroke which incapacitated him for the remainder of his term.
Franklin Roosevelt’s second term was caricatured by his Supreme Court packing scheme which backfired and cost him dearly in the loss of congressional support. His vain conceit prevented him from learning from the experience, and his attempt to punish uncooperative Democrats in the 1938 elections guaranteed he wouldn’t get anything through Congress until his third term, which saw America dragged into yet another world war.
After completing Roosevelt’s fourth term, Truman defeated Tom Dewey in a surprise upset election, winning his “second” term but his first election. During his elected term he became embroiled in the Korean War, fired a popular but sassy General McArthur, and rejected a peace offer that would have put the North and South Korean demarcation line where it ultimately ended up at war’s end, years and many pointless casualties later. His popularity plunging, Truman squandered his chances for a second elected term.
The politically popular general who had won the war in Europe, Dwight Eisenhower, followed Truman in office. During his first term, 75% of his legislative requests passed in Congress. During his second term only 37% passed. He sparked controversy in school integration, was surprised by the Soviet Sputnik launching, and suffered the embarrassment of having a U-2 spy plane shot down over Soviet territory while declaring he knew nothing of the U-2 missions.
In second terms, Lyndon Johnson got the country stuck in a no-win war in Viet Nam, Richard Nixon won a landslide second-term victory that was undone by a petty criminal break-in, forcing him to become the only President to resign, Reagan became ensnared in the Iran-Contra scandal, and Clinton became known for sex scandals, most notably the Monica Lewinsky affair, whose torrid details sent parents scurrying to shut off televisions before their children’s tender ears were exposed to X-rated reporting.
Is there a common thread in the second-term curse highlighted above? Perhaps there are several. The chickens of the first term often come home to roost in the second. Presidents usually play all of the face cards they hold in the first term and hold weak hands in the second. The conceit and hubris that comes from believing the success of one’s reelection baloney indulges a lack of caution and encourages overreach in the second term. Key staffers leave in the second term and are replaced by second-stringers who can’t manage a boss who believes he walks on water. The President’s party falls out of line as potential contenders for the throne begin to assert their independence from him. And a pall of lame duckness settles over the administration, sucking all creative energy out of its second term, especially in the second half.
Look at each of the 13 presidents who had second terms and you’ll see some if not most of these footprints in their fecklessness. They should have quit when they were ahead.
Obama has spent four years showing anyone with at least the attention span of an amoeba that he is the most radical politician in the history of the Republic to have held the office of President. Is there any reason to believe that, unrestrained by the carrot of a second term, he will be less so if given another four years? Is it realistic to believe his amateurish first term was the chrysalis of hope and change which will shatter the unbroken evidence of 13 ineffectual second terms?
Anyone want to buy the Golden Gate Bridge? I can give you a good price.
No comments:
Post a Comment