As we begin to contemplate the prospect of a second term for President Obama, I think it is important to reflect back on all our post-war presidents. We’ll discover that the presidency isn’t an easy job and most of our presidents have been grotesque failures. In recent years, historians have been trying to rehabilitate Harry Truman’s performance in office, but he didn’t run for a second term in 1952 because he had gotten us mired in an unwinnable war in Korea and the people had turned decisively against him. JFK didn’t live to seek a second term. Lyndon Johnson didn’t seek a second term in 1968 because he had gotten us mired in an unwinnable war in Vietnam and the people had turned decisively against him. Richard Nixon won a second term but was forced to resign in disgrace. Jimmy Carter was pretty much a failure on every level and had to fight to even be renominated by the Democratic Party. Ronald Reagan’s second term was marred by scandal, a collapsed stock market, and senility. He staggered to the end. Poppy Bush involved us in another land war in Asia, which really only began to end this past month. He failed to win reelection mostly because the economy was bad at the wrong time. Bill Clinton won reelection, but his second term was mired in scandal and humiliation, culminating with his impeachment by a deranged House of Representatives. George W. Bush’s second term was the most shameful and disastrous we’ve seen since James Buchanan was in office.
That leaves Dwight Eisenhower as the only president in the post-war era to fill two terms in office without bringing ruinous change to the country and/or personal humiliation to themselves. It’s really a horrible record. We have had dreadful leadership in this country. And, yet, I can’t see Obama having to resign or being impeached or bringing us something like the Iran-Contra scandal. He’s more likely to end our land wars in Asia than to start new ones, although Iran remains a tricky trouble spot with the potential to complicate or even ruin Obama’s second term. As far as I am concerned, Obama brings the reforms of an LBJ without the drama, and the steadiness of Dwight Eisenhower without the cardboard flavor.
It’s easy to forget how good we have it. But I honestly don’t think we’ve had a president who truly deserved reelection since Eisenhower, and I probably would have voted for Stevenson. It’s so rare for us to have a president worthy of a second term that we probably should go out and make sure that he actually gets reelected.
Good way to start:
Rejected
Another reason:
I think they mean alternative to a route through the Sandhills.
And then there’s occupy, which prefers to bomb the White House and terrorize a family with small children, rather than actually help out.
Darkly funny, because we all assumed it was gonna be teabaggers. Welp firebaggers have shown themselves to be even WORSE than teabaggers.
You’re a nutcase.
Oh ferchrissakes, “bomb the White House?” “Endanger a family with small children?”
You sound like Fox News describing protesters at the Republican Convention – and I don’t even like the people protesting the White House.
Well said. So many of Obama’s problems gave him no good option, only a least bad option. Almost every time Obama makes a decision, even if I’m disappointed by it, after I learn the factors affecting the decision I find myself saying that’s how I would have decided. Obama is the first president in my lifetime I can say that about.
LBJ brought more more quickly, and a lot that doesn’t get talked about much any more. I’m thinking of a program for free legal aid for working-class people for example that my grandfather was involved in. Lots of stuff. Unfortunately, lots of blowback, too. His systemic changes built not only the action, but the reaction into the system, and we got our current GOP as part of that process. Obama, especially if he can solidify gains in a second term, will likely have the greater long-term positive influence.
I think that’s a good point. Gradual change is often more lasting and effective, in part because people don’t notice it as much and therefore aren’t apt to freak out about it. That can have good and bad aspects. For example, much of the Affordable Care Act is being implemented under the radar (of mainstream attention, at least) and so is protected from deranged Fox News-type demagoguing while it fuses itself onto the healthcare delivery system. On the other hand, the ACA is still unpopular because most folks don’t know what’s in it.
Gradual change can also be problematic because it’s, well, gradual. Often we need much more dramatic change than the system can bear, or believes it can bear. Climate change is a case in-point. Similarly, the 1964-66 Congress was truly a great one with many historic achievements: Medicare, Medicaid, voting rights, environmental and social legislation, etc. But many of those things should have been achieved long before, and only were achieved because of the freakishly large Democratic command of the federal government during those two years.
I do not suggest nor do you suggest I do that LBJ’s accomplishments weren’t real, huge, and good. I would also say as you suggest that he didn’t start from scratch but rather the legislation came out in a burst at the end of a long process of agitation. 450 years give or take, in the case of the Civil Rights Act…
That said, the ACA enshrines the principle in law that no person should be without health care in this country, which is colossally important not only in its current manifestation but in its implications. The potential for developing a sane set of socio-economic relationships in this country is huge, and he deserves the lion’s share of the credit for getting it passed. That the process was so messy to me makes it all the more of an accomplishment.
Yeah. There’s no question that the ACA was a very big deal for the reasons you mentioned, is very dramatic and not “gradual” in the way I use the term. I guess I was thinking about more of the wonky stuff that’s too technical for most folks (including myself) to want spend time trying to understand. Stuff like exchanges, cost containment, etc. I mean, the actual details of our health care system are pretty damn boring, as anyone who has had to deal with their provider on an extended basis will attest to.
LBJ brought more more quickly, and a lot that doesn’t get talked about much any more.
LBJ was able to get a lot done shortly after coming into office, true, but it was all stuff that the Kennedy administration had wanted and had been frustrated on for years. But with Kennedy’s death, there was such a wind at LBJ’s back that he was able to be very effective.
I think it’s more accurate to talk about the JFK/LBJ years almost as one presidency. They came into office in 1961, and really started racking up the accomplishments in 1964 and after.
Al Gore, elected once, might have deserved a 2nd term.
JFK was assassinated because he would have won a second term.
This made me laugh, even though it’s really not funny at all.
I for sure would have voted for Stevenson. Eisenhower exploited the “commie menace” to the hilt, enabled Joe McCarthy, saddled us with a permanent car addiction by destroying all the alternatives, and gave us a sanctimonious warning about the military-industrial complex that he had been quietly conspiring with for 8 years. To my mind Truman and LBJ were more worthy of reelection than Ike, in balance, despite their massive failings. But as you say, the bar is incredibly low.
Agreed on Obama, even though he’s been a disappointment in a number of areas as is responsible for perhaps the dumbest, most damaging platitude coming from a politician in many decades: “I want to look forward, not back.” Still, unlike the others cited, he does offer hope that a second term might yet produce a legacy to be proud of.
Stevenson rocked.
Third term, really. FDR died less than three months after getting reelected for the last time. Truman was President for almost the full eight years, and was reelected over Dewey in 1948. And his first term was pretty much the only four year period I think compares favorably to Obama’s tenure so far, at least in terms of historical impact and global transformation. That was a hell of a job to have to walk into cold. Then the second term happened and everything went to shit. So I think you are on point here, Booman.
well, LBJ also served part of a second term, and I didn’t even mention Jerry Ford, who also served a partial term.
Well sure, but I’m saying there’s a qualitative difference between LBJ becoming president basically immediately into an election year vs. Truman having almost four full years as president before having to face the voters himself. Johnson’s pseudo-first term was little more than a year, in comparison. I just tend to view ’48 as a genuine reelection in the face of a postwar reactionary minisurge compared to the 1964 farce. To me, Johnson failed to get reelected in ’68, while Truman failed to get reelected twice in ’52. Which, excepting FDR, meant he ending up serving as long as any other two term president.
That’s a fine and fair point, but even if he deserved to be reelected in 1948, it’s hard to argue that he deserved to be reelected in 1952. I mean, we all love South Korea and can see how terrible North Korea is, but getting involved there left us militarily committed twenty years past the demise of the USSR. If we learned enough from it to avoid Vietnam, it would have been worth it. But we didn’t.
That’s kind of a nonsequitur, is it not? Has anyone said as much?
tell the truth, BooMan
Seems like most of my life Dems have been on the outside looking in, and important policy initiatives have been few and far between. Clinton interrupted the Reagan/Bush run but, aside from turning around the economy in the 90’s, made little progress on much else. One could even say that his signing of banking deregulation contributed to the mess we have today. Obama has taken the first steps to correcting a flawed health system (gonna take many more) and made it so gays can serve openly in the military. Those are biggies. The survival of the health care law probably depends on his reelection. That alone gets my vote.
You’re right about Clinton’s role in the current mess we’re in. From even a left-of-center perspective, he was a disaster as President, passing the vicious “welfare reform” among other things. His balancing of the budget was not in itself a bad thing, but it had a context.
There is a large swath of white progressivedom that seems to imagine that Clinton would have passed a more aggressively progressive agenda than Obama. Nonsense. Obama is not only a more effective legislator than Clinton–who at best can be said to have effectively passed the opposition’s agenda–but a much more progressive one.
One thing that doesn’t get mentioned enough about Truman, possibly because it’s a bitter pill for a lot of people to swallow, is that it’s been fairly conclusively demonstrated that, whatever public rationale, the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to send a message to the USSR, not to end the war with Japan. I am thinking here of most famously Gar Alperovitz’ “Atomic Diplomacy” which if one wishes to contest its conclusion will need to be done in detail with lots of reference to primary material, because I don’t have much patience with any defense of that war crime.
Stalin was rotten, but the Cold War as it went down would not, to break my own rule of not posing a counterfactual, have happened as it did had FDR been able to continue diplomacy himself.
It’s important to remember that using that bomb cost the US a lot diplomatically, among other things. In this country, people tend to forget that Truman ordered the nuking of two cities with no war production happening in either, nearly completely civilian casualties. Around the world, it’s not forgotten, and it makes it less easy for the US to be the “good guy” in international politics. It makes it hard to trust that the US as a state has good intentions. This can be hard sometimes for people in the US to understand, but it’s at Truman’s feet.
Your points on Clinton and Truman are excellent.
I would add that Eisenhower lied about Gary Powers and that has had echos down through the years.
For pardoning Nixon was awful.
Ford, not For.
You know, your points are spot-on, but I have total rose colored glasses on for Eisenhower because I cry–more likely get a little misty–every time I see Eisenhower’s farewell address. To think that a President said that. I actually do tear up when I see the footage of FDR enumerating his economic bill of rights.
Damn, I’m kind of a mess, I suppose.
I get frigging tired of this GOP mantra played out by progressive Democrats because it just isn’t true.
Jimmy Carter took a principled stand and worked to try to release the hostages taken by Iran instead of campaigning. For that alone, he deserved to be re-elected and not to have the interests of the US sandbagged by a politically opportunist Republican campaign violating the Logan Act.
He secured a peace treaty between Israel and Egypt and was laying groundwork to walkback Middle East conflict.
He put in place an energy strategy that so terrified the oil companies that Ronald Reagan yanked it out root-and-vine including the solar units on the top of the White House.
He appointed Paul Volcker as chair of the Federal Reserve. Volcker whipped inflation and would have put in place policies that reined in the speculative flood of internationalized dollars that was driving stagflation.
Jimmy Carter deserved re-election moreso than Eisenhower did. Progressives, Democratic operatives, the media, and the Republican campaign worked to convince the public otherwise.
There is a lesson in this last turn of events.
thanks for your comment.