Lately, it really has seemed as if the Obama White House is incapable of producing good news beyond the fact that the debt ceiling wasn’t smashed. Swooning websites, security snoops run amok — there’d be some comfort in believing that it’s all historically inevitable. “In almost every case, you can argue that the second terms have been pretty dreadful,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian.
Think about it. Richard Nixon had to resign. Bill Clinton got impeached. George W. Bush had an average second-term approval rating of 37 percent, which the Gallup people say was the worst presidential plummet in modern history.
Woodrow Wilson had a stroke and spent much of his second term in the bedroom. Franklin Roosevelt was one of the most successful presidents, but that was because of Terms 1 and 3. Two was a mess.
In fact, the pattern goes all the way back to George Washington. “Certainly, from his point of view, it was horrible,” said Joseph Ellis, who has written biographies of Washington and Thomas Jefferson. One of the reasons was the eruption of a hyperpartisan media. When Washington retired, Ellis noted, one paper announced: “We can all pray for his imminent death.”
Nothing so soothing as the knowledge that everything we’re doing wrong was done even worse by the founding fathers.
Obviously, there are exceptions to the two-term rule. James Monroe did pretty well, and Dwight Eisenhower. Ronald Reagan was popular when he departed, despite Iran-Contra. But the record does trend pretty hard in one direction. Looking at it, you wonder why more presidents don’t just declare victory and go home after four years. Like James Polk, who often shows up in Top-10-presidents lists. But, then, how often does he come up in conversation? How often do you hear a politician say: “In the immortal words of James Polk?”
There are worse things than being a second-term president. You could, for instance, be a person who lost to one. Look at poor John Kerry, wandering around the globe having meetings with heads of state we wiretapped. Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to have anything to do but construct new vacation homes.
Ever since Congress invented term limits, it’s been a given that there’s just so much a lame-duck president can hope to do, and time is short. In February, President Obama told an interviewer that he wanted to act quickly because “once we get through this year, then people start looking at the midterms.”
That’s the problem. We didn’t get this year! We didn’t even get a couple of months! The way we’re going now, we could wind up looking back on the highlight of Obama Two as the time he lucked out on Syria.
There’s still hope. Bill Clinton’s second term was horrible in so many ways, but we did wind up with the longest economic surge in American history. I believe I speak for us all when I say I would trade an impeachment trial for another one of those.
The very fact that Clinton was teetering on the verge of disaster seemed to cause the American public to rally around him. Do you think that would work for Obama?
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