IS THERE A SECOND-TERM CURSE?
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| President Barack Obama |
Watching
the coverage of President Barack Obama’s second oath of office this morning on
CNN, I was engrossed by the discussion among several noted historians and
political insiders on what is called “the second-term curse.” As the theory goes, United States presidents
who are fortunate enough to win a second term in office often discover the hard
way that what appears to be a blessing by the American people is actually a
curse in disguise! Most interesting to me was the comparison of those
presidents who have had second terms, and the question of which of these men
have succeeded and which have failed.
Needless to say, it got me thinking about a potential blog post—just in
time for the 2013 inaugural ceremonies!
In two hundred
and twenty-four years, only seventeen presidents have been elected to second
terms, and that second term has frequently been wracked with overwhelming
disappointment. The problem seems to be
that the American people expect their chief executive to perform as good as, or
better than he did in the first term, and this is simply an impossible
expectation. The world is almost never
the same place that it was when the president first took office. And because the demands on the office change
with every situation, the incumbent does not always live up to the
expectations. Consider the failure of
George W. Bush’s greatest second-term initiative, the revamping of social
security. President Bush interpreted
his reelection as a sweeping endorsement of all of his proposed policies, when
in fact the people elected him to see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan through
to honorable victory and keep the country secure at home. Thus his plans for social security were
resoundingly rejected by Democrats and Republicans, and the perception
that the wars were unending led to the transfer of political power in Congress
in the mid-term elections. In the end,
the second term presidents often find themselves trying to live up to their own
self images—established during their first term—and, as one historian so
eloquently stated on this morning’s talk shows, “sequels are almost never as
good as the first!”
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| George Washington |
So then, which
of the second-term presidents was most successful? One historian today quickly blurted out his opinion, which should
come as no surprise to anyone searching for a safe and simple answer: “why,
George Washington, of course!” But is
this an accurate assessment? Was
Washington, for instance, really as successful of a president as Americans have
come to believe? It is certainly true
that, when we rank our presidents from best to worst, Washington traditionally
gets high marks. For instance, in a
2006 ranking by Atlantic Magazine of the most influential Americans of
all time he came in second only to Abraham Lincoln.
But I suspect
that the Washington we place on so high a pedestal is not the real
Washington! As historian Marcus
Cunliffe suggested in George Washington: Man and Monument (1958),
Washington and his contemporaries—as well as his apologists during the
nineteenth century—purposefully shielded from us the first president’s
shortcomings in order to leave for posterity a god-like monument devoid of any
wrongdoing; a perfect American hero for all ages. Despite recent attempts by scholars to reverse the damage of the
last two hundred years, it does not seem to have worked! The legendary Washington endured. For an example, lets look back at that
historian who claimed this morning that he was the most successful second-term
president in history. When asked for
his reasoning, he listed two “successes” in Washington’s second term—the
bringing together of various political factions within the New Republic, and
the president’s decision to relinquish power after eight years in office rather
than become an elected monarch. Because
he relinquished power where others would have coveted it, Washington rightly
deserves to be praised as the greatest man of all time (a title bestowed upon
him by none other than his old adversary, King George III), but I am more
concerned with that first example—that he unified the country’s divided
political factions.
It is true that
Washington was reelected unanimously to a second term in 1792, but this was not
because of political unity. On the
contrary, the country was almost as deeply divided then as it is today! The Federalist Party (led by Washington’s
Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton) and the emerging
Democratic-Republicans (led by Congressman James Madison and, less visibly,
Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson) offered up very different ideas about
domestic and foreign policy, and had no problem criticizing Washington when he
did not adhere to their points of view.
For example, in 1793 when news arrived in America that French Jacobins
had executed King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette, and that Great Britain
had declared war against France, Washington was called a traitor to the
revolution by the Democratic-Republicans for issuing an act of neutrality. The charge was again revived in 1795 when
Washington signed the Jay Treaty, securing Britain’s recognition of American
neutrality in return for America’s favoritism of Britain in matters of
trade. Furthermore, in 1794 the
Democratic-Republicans labeled Washington a tyrant and a bully for
nationalizing the Pennsylvania militia to quell a rebellion of grain farmers on
the frontier who had opposed Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax. Although some historians say that he feared
setting a precedent by holding the presidency until he died in office, it is
likely that the culmination of these hurtful charges from people who just four
years earlier had so warmly embraced him as their national hero helped to
compell Washington to forego a third term in office. Clearly, then, despite what some historians have suggested,
Washington was not only the first man to be president of the United States, but
also the first president to suffer from the “second-term curse!”
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| Thomas Jefferson |
So,
if Washington was not the best second-term president, who was? When Thomas Jefferson was reelected by a
landslide in 1804 the nation was at peace with all foreign nations, its size
had doubled the year before with the Louisiana Purchase, it was well on its way
to becoming a continental power, all federal taxes had been repealed, and the
national debt had been cut in half! But,
in 1807 Britain and France once more went to war, and both sought to use the
United States as a wedge against the other.
The United States nearly came to blows with Great Britain when the HMS
Leopard fired on the USS Chesapeake, wounding and killing dozens of
sailors and taking four men prisoner for being supposed deserters of the
British navy. And because Jefferson did
not have a strong enough military to fight off Great Britain, he instead issued
an embargo of British goods in an attempt to wound that nation economically
that completely backfired, leading to a recession in the last year of his
term.
Jefferson’s
successors, James Madison and James Monroe, faired little better. By the end of Madison’s second term in
office, the nation’s debt had ballooned from an ill-conceived war with Great
Britain that left much of the government’s public buildings in smoldering
ruins, and that had increasingly alienated the Native American tribes on the
frontier. The one consolation for
Madison was the fact that his political opposition—the Federalists—fared little
better. Their party ultimately
dissolved within the next four years, leaving James Monroe to rule over a
one-party government in a time known as “the Era of Good Feelings.” But, alas, those feelings were short-lived,
for by the end his second term Monroe was confronted with a growing sectional
division between North and South over slavery and the Missouri Compromise. As well, by 1824 the political parties had reappeared
with a vengeance (whereas Monroe ran unopposed for his second term, his
predecessor was chosen from a list of no less than four different
candidates)! Thus, when Jefferson,
Madison, and Monroe left office, it could be rightly said that they too had
become victims of the “second-term curse!”
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| Abraham Lincoln |
When it comes to
twentieth-century presidents, the record of second-term successes is also
fairly scarce! Woodrow Wilson, for
instance, was elected on the campaign slogan “He Kept Us Out of War!” But only one month into his second term, the
United States found itself bogged down in the quagmire that was World War
I. That conflict eventually cost the
lives of over 100,000 American men.
Even worse, Wilson’s most important global initiatives—the ratification
of the Treaty of Versailles, and the establishment of the League of
Nations—were dismal failures at home, and after a grueling national campaign in
support of these measures he suffered a debilitating stroke that left him a
recluse for the remainder of his term.
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| Franklin D. Roosevelt |
Although he was
one of the greatest politicians of the twentieth century, Franklin Delano
Roosevelt also suffered from the “second-term curse.” Following the greatest landslide victory in American history (he
won 523 out of 531 electoral votes, and every state except Vermont and Maine),
he completely misinterpreted the mandate from the American people and undertook
the greatest power grab in American political history by seeking to pack the
Supreme Court with additional judges friendly to his New Deal policies. As a result of this alarming measure, the
people lost a great deal of confidence in their chief executive, and the
Congress ceased to cooperate in further progressive legislation, pushing the
nation back into recession by 1937.
Perhaps the greatest consequence of FDR’s second-term blunders was the
smallest electoral victory of his political career in 1940, when he won a third
term by a comfortable 449 electoral votes, but also lost more states than in
either of his first two campaigns.
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| Richard M. Nixon |
The trend of
second term blunders continued through the rest of the twentieth century. Dwight Eisenhower’s second term was wracked
by the rising tensions between America and the Soviet Union, in which both
nations sought to outdo the other in development of weapons of mass
destruction. It was also during Ike’s
second term that the Soviets achieved a victory over the Americans in the space
race by successfully launching their satellite Sputnik into orbit. Despite his success at opening relations
with China, and ending the hugely unpopular Vietnam War, Richard Nixon’s second
term lasted only two years, as members of Congress and the media hounded the 37th
president from all sides for his alleged involvement in the cover up of a
break-in at the Democratic National Committee’s headquarters at the Watergate
Hotel in 1972 by employees of the Committee to Re-elect the President. As a result, Nixon might possibly win the
prize for worst second term in all history, as he was eventually compelled to
resign his office in August 1974.
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| Ronald Reagan |
The last of the
“second-termers” of the twentieth century fared little better. President Ronald Reagan, for instance, ranks
with FDR as one of the most successful politicians of the century, but although
he managed to break the curse of presidents assassinated every twenty years, he
was less successful at shielding his administration from the “second-term
curse.” In 1986, about the time that
the president won reelection, the first news of the “Iran-Contra Affair” broke,
in which the American government traded arms to Iran with the hopes that the
arms sales would secure the release of hostages and allow intelligence agencies
to fund rebels in Nicaragua--involving America in a foreign rebellion and clearly
violating U.S. law. And while Reagan
emphatically denied having any knowledge of these dealings, he later divulged
to the American people in a televised address in March 1987 that, “my heart and
my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence
tell me it is not.” And while he
resided over the most successful economy in sixty years, President Bill
Clinton’s personal life interfered with his ability to govern effectively, and
his failure to tell the truth under oath resulted in impeachment hearings in
the House of Representatives (the first since the Watergate scandal, and only
the second in history to indict the president).
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| Andrew Jackson |
