Second Term

The Second-term Blues

Kevin Baker — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 11:14:30 +0000

The Second-term Blues Kevin Baker Fri, 01/21/2011 - 06:14

Second Terms

Ellen Feldman — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 17:40:39 +0000

Second Terms Ellen Feldman Thu, 10/13/2005 - 13:40

I think John Steele Gordon is onto something in his remarks about our genetic need to tell stories. Though second-term blues have been common throughout our history, the reasons for them, as both he and Fredric Schwarz point out, are wildly disparate. A glance at three recent presidents reveals just how varied the problems can be and how diametrically opposed the underlying causes often are.

Frederic Schwarz speaks of post-election fatigue and depression. In the case of Clinton, I think we can add boredom to the list, plus a flair for shooting himself in the foot to relieve the boredom. After achieving a first term and reelection, what was this superachiever to do but raise the stakes for what he could do, or get away with?

One can argue that FDR’s second term presents a different set of conditions, because he was the cause, not the victim or beneficiary, of the 22nd amendment. But a convincing case can and has been made that early in his second term FDR had no intention of running for a third, and that only the threat of war persuaded him to stand again in 1940. In other words, in his own mind he might have been in his final term. Perhaps that was why, buoyed by his 1936 landslide, he set out to make permanent in his second term the achievements of his first. He not only attempted to pack the court, he also sought to streamline the administration, which he had helped make so unwieldy, and purge his own party of conservatives in the 1938 election.

The current President Bush’s case has certain similarities to those of both these predecessors. Though not reelected by anything close to a landslide, he chose to perceive his return to office as a mandate and set out to solidify the achievements or failures (depending on your point of view) of his first term, not the least of which would be the undoing of FDR’s Social Security plan. But whether suffering from post-election fatigue (which seems unlikely in view of the amount of time he spent vacationing at his ranch before Katrina), depression, boredom, or, more likely, hubris, Katrina and the downward spiraling war in Iraq seem to have caught him, and his appointed cronies, napping.

Perhaps the real question is not whether second-term misfortunes are unavoidable, or why they occur, but how serious they are in the long run. An impeached Clinton still remains wildly popular at home and even more so abroad. FDR did not succeed in packing the court, streamlining the administration, or purging his party, but he did go on to a third and even fourth term. Stay tuned for President Bush’s final chapters.

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Second Term

Why Do Presidents’ Second Terms Go Sour?

John Steele Gordon — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 17:45:37 +0000

Why Do Presidents’ Second Terms Go Sour? John Steele Gordon Tue, 10/11/2005 - 13:45

The Bush Administration right now is going through a major bad patch.

Hurricane Katrina, the rising cost of oil, the Miers nomination, and the undropped shoe of the Valerie Plame investigation are but some of its troubles. As a result, Bush’s approval ratings are at the lowest point of his Presidency. And Democrats—and their minions in the media—are whispering excitedly about the Bush White House sliding into terminal lameduckness and even taking back Congress in 2006.

I’d recommend holding off on ordering the champagne just yet. Political situations, like a game of backgammon, can be reversed by a single good roll of the dice.

Katrina is under control, with opportunities for changing the Administration’s big-spender image with the Republican base opening up. The worst of the oil-price increases seems to be over for the moment, being down ten dollars from the Katrina high. Harriet Miers may acquit herself well in the hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee (and she’s suffered such abuse in the week since she was nominated, she’s almost bound to do better than expected). The Iraq election on Sunday could be a resounding success. And the Valerie Plame investigation might well end with a whimper, not a bang.

But why is it that Presidential second terms always seem to get into trouble? Clinton’s handling of the exposure of his affair with Monica Lewinsky got him impeached. Reagan had the Iran-Contra scandal. Nixon had Watergate and was forced to resign. Eisenhower’s chief of staff, Sherman Adams, had to quit after he accepted gifts from a businessman pursuing government contracts. Franklin Roosevelt, having just carried 46 states, tried to pack the Supreme Court and suffered a major political defeat as a result.

Even in the nineteenth century, Presidents often had major second-term troubles. Grant was hit by the Credit Mobilier scandal in the year following his reelection. Jefferson forced the disastrous Embargo Act through Congress and faced a near revolt in New England because of it.

I see three possible explanations for this. One, of course, is mere coincidence. History is full of seeming patterns that don’t turn out to predict the future. The most famous in American history, I suppose, was the fact that beginning in 1840 every President elected in a year ending in zero died in office (Harrison, Lincoln, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, and Kennedy). Then Reagan, elected in 1980, finished out his term (despite John Hinckley’s best efforts, to be sure).

Perhaps George Bush’s bad patch will be just that, a bad patch. He has run a remarkably clean White House up to now, after all. And his political fortunes are still a long way from a crisis stage.

Another possibility is what might be called buyer’s remorse (or, in this case perhaps, Miers remorse). Presidents pull out all the stops to get reelected and, having done that successfully, are subject to hubris if they won in a landslide (such as Reagan in 1984 and Roosevelt in 1936). If the President won more modestly, with a deeply divided electorate, such as George Bush in 2004, the leftover discontents are just waiting to kindle trouble at the first opportunity. In either case, the possibilities of a public reaction against the incumbent—now familiar after four years in the White House—are strong.

I personally prefer a third possibility. Human beings are natural-born storytellers, with a narrative instinct that is deep in our genes. There are few things we like better than telling and hearing stories. And all stories have a dramatic structure, often of the boy-meets-girl, boy-pursues-girl, boy-wins-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy-gets-girl-back form.

The boy-loses-girl phase of a story is known among dramatists as “the second act problem.” First acts almost always end on a high note (in musicals this is called the first-act closer, often a rousing production number or a highly dramatic song, such as the famous “Soliloquy” in Carousel).

But the second act invariably opens with a major problem that has to be resolved for a happy ending: Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan are now clearly both candidates for Mount Rushmore. Or, of course, the problem is not resolved, for a tragic ending: Nixon and Clinton will both be most remembered for their second-act problems, not their real achievements.

Every two-term administration is, in effect, a two-act play in which the first act ends on a high note with the President’s reelection. Perhaps second terms always seem to start with a major problem simply because our story-loving genes demand one, and the media, therefore, try even harder than usual to find one. In anything so complex and vast as a modern American administration, with so many highly competitive reporters examining its every move, they can almost always find one. Then it soon takes on a life of its own.

Perhaps the second term crisis to which American administrations seem so prone is merely a case of life imitating art.

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Second Term

Bush’s Current Travails

John Steele Gordon — Fri, 30 Sep 2005 23:46:32 +0000

Bush’s Current Travails John Steele Gordon Fri, 09/30/2005 - 19:46

Joshua Zeitz blogged on Wednesday that some liberal pundits, such as the Washington Post’s E. J. Dionne, are happily opining that the present troubles of the Bush Administration are turning the President into a lame duck if not a dead duck. Perhaps so, perhaps not. A week can be an eternity in politics, and a few bits of good news (such as a successful election in Iraq, a better than predicted situation in New Orleans, etc.) or bad news for Democrats (such as a budding scandal in the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee that The New York Times—surprise!—has not considered news fit to print, although its public editor is now wondering why), and the situation can look very different.

Mr. Zeitz notes that the Watergate scandal of the Nixon era—far and away the greatest political scandal since World War II—gave the Democrats only a temporary boost. He argues that Watergate was evidence that government doesn’t work and conservatives always benefit in the long term from such evidence. I disagree. I think Watergate was evidence that while men are frail and always will be, the Constitution is not frail and government did indeed work. Nixon had no option but to resign in disgrace, a historical scarlet letter he will carry forever.

The Democrats reaped only temporary benefits from Watergate not because it made the people distrust government, but because the tides of history are against them and they won’t or can’t admit it yet.

It is an old saying in international politics that “Great Powers shuffle on and off the stage of history noisily.” So do great political movements, including what I will call modern American liberalism. (Political labels almost always create false dichotomies, which are handy in polemics but not in reasoned discourse, so please don’t take the labels herein too seriously: liberalism, Democrats, the left, etc. are all synonyms here.)

Born in the post-Civil War era, when industrial capitalism was also aborning and capital was in the saddle, liberalism made only fitful progress at first (such as with the Sherman Antitrust Act and the income tax that the Supreme Court overturned in 1895). But the election of 1896 turned out to be a watershed election, and the right half of the political spectrum would be the dominant power for the next 32 years. The Republicans only lost the Presidency in that era in 1912, when Theodore Roosevelt split the party. (Woodrow Wilson, despite being an incumbent with many accomplishments and with a grave foreign situation, barely won reelection in 1916.)

But the great crisis of the Depression changed everything in American politics, and the left swept to decisive power in 1932 under one of the most charismatic and talented politicians in American history. Over the next 40 years liberalism transformed the country and its social and economic system, and very much for the better. It accomplished virtually all of the goals it had set in its days before power: fairer labor laws, a social safety net, civil rights, effective financial regulation, women’s rights. It transformed the country from one of haves and have nots to one of haves and have mores, a land of opportunity for everyone such as had never before been dreamed possible.

Meanwhile, the Republicans, shell-shocked at being out of power after all that time, didn’t know what to do. They felt they had a natural right to run the country and couldn’t understand that the world had changed. They were reduced to demanding a return to an earlier time, complaining that those now unaccountably in power were destroying all that was right and good about the country, and demonizing “that man in the White House.” One of the most famous New Yorker cartoons of the era showed a group of well-dressed middle-aged people telling friends to “come along, we’re going to the Trans-Lux to hiss Roosevelt.”

But like all political movements, liberalism eventually ran out of intellectual steam. It had accomplished its early goals and, discovering that a secular Kingdom of Heaven had not appeared on earth, insisted on more of the same, even when the evidence was clear that more of the same wasn’t working. It began living increasingly in the past. Today, it seems for Democrats that domestically it is always 1937, in foreign affairs 1968. The civil rights movement triumphed forty years ago, but Democrats are forever screaming “racism!” when race has nothing whatever to do with the situation (such as in New Orleans).

With the Democrats having nothing but old and hopelessly out-of-date ideas, Republicans finally woke up and began developing a whole series of new ideas—good, bad, and indifferent ones—to meet new problems. And they began to win elections as a result. I’m now 61 years old. Since I turned 21, my entire adult life in other words, only once has the Democratic candidate for President won a majority of the popular vote. That was in 1976, when Jimmy Carter won a considerably less than impressive 50.46 percent. When another charismatic and politically gifted man, Ronald Reagan, won the Presidency, in 1980, it was another watershed election. Because of gerrymandering and the value of incumbency, Congress remained largely in Democratic hands. Then in 1994, in one of the most remarkable elections in American history, the Democrats were swept from power everywhere. That year, except for Senator Chuck Robb defeating the controversial Oliver North in Virginia, and the iconic Senator Ted Kennedy surviving in Massachusetts, the Republicans won everything in sight from sea to sea, and they have been the unquestionable majority party ever since.

And how have the Democrats reacted? Exactly like the Republicans in the 1930s. They can’t understand why they are no longer in power, believe that they ought to be (it’s amazing how many Democrats blame the people—demos in Greek, for being too stupid to vote the “right” way), demand a return to an earlier era and earlier ideas, and, most of all, demonize “that man in the White House.”

The Democrats will not become the majority party again until they deserve it. They have to stop reliving past triumphs (and, paradoxically, insisting that those triumphs didn’t accomplish what they did); they have to develop twenty-first-century ideas to solve twenty-first-century problems; they need to find new leaders.

Meanwhile, The New Yorker should run a cartoon showing aging but obviously prosperous hippies in a high-tech living room, talking on a cell phone and telling their friends to come on over, they’re going to turn on CBS and hiss Bush.

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Why Presidents Have Lousy Second Terms

Frederic D. O'Brien — Tue, 12 Oct 1999 17:48:24 +0000

Why Presidents Have Lousy Second Terms Frederic D. O'Brien Tue, 10/12/1999 - 13:48

(The editor of AmericanHeritage.com asked for our thoughts on why Presidents’ second terms so often go badly, and whether it has anything to do with the 22nd Amendment, which limits them to two terms.)

Several factors are involved. The first is simple regression toward the mean. To get reelected, you have to have good luck in your first term. During the second term, chances are your luck will be merely average, so it will look like you did a worse job. (This also explains why the Red Sox didn’t win the World Series this year.) A related factor, similar in concept but less random, is the business cycle. If the economy goes well in your first term, it will probably get worse sometime during the second, and people will blame it on you.

Another factor is postponement. Scandals tend to come up in the second term because they can usually be put off until after the election. The Watergate burglary happened in Nixon’s first term, but no serious investigation could be started until his second one. Paula Jones had been after Bill Clinton for years, but his lawyers managed to keep her at bay until he was reelected. The same goes for tough decisions, like getting involved in a war. Smart Presidents wait until their second term. Wilson and LBJ understood this, but Madison didn’t, and he nearly got kicked out. Similarly, short-term economic fixes like large deficits, overzealous budget cutting, or messing around with the currency or interest rates (to the extent that the President can influence these things) can be used to shift trouble into the second term.

Simple fatigue may also be a factor, as well as post-election depression. Plus lots of your staff and cabinet will resign, so you have to bring in the benchwarmers. In addition, a President often exhausts his bag of tricks and reforms and initiatives in his first term and spends the second one trying to look busy. Then there’s the seven-year itch; it’s hard to stay in love with any President for two whole terms.

None of these things are directly related to the 22nd Amendment, which limits Presidents to two terms; they would apply equally well without it. And in fact, Presidents have had shaky second terms going all the way back to Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. As far as I can tell, the amendment itself comes into play mainly because people are less inclined to do your bidding (or cover up for you) when they know you’ll be out of office in a couple of years. Instead, they concentrate on securing their own future, which may require them to make a show of independence—especially if the President has already started looking weak.

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Second Term