Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Bush backers boast that his victory gives him a chance to join the greats. But most reelected presidents have been far less effective in their second term than in their first.
Nov 12, 2004 | Somehow, I always knew a Red Sox victory in the World Series would bring us dangerously close to Armageddon. And now, with George W. Bush's resounding victory on Nov. 2, the table is set just a little too neatly. The Kerry administration lasted about six hours, from the midafternoon gossip about exit polls until the sun set on our fantasy and the real news came in. Suddenly, emphatically, all speculation about which Democrat would be secretary of state seemed worse than inconsequential. A year ago, the agony of Red Sox fans was increased by the knowledge that groundskeepers had prematurely spray-painted a World Series logo on the grass of Fenway Park, before losing Game 7 to the hated Yankees. This year's six-hour Indian summer had the same effect. Now Democrats have a long winter and four more years to reflect on what might have been.
Instead, four very different years now begin. Will they resemble the last four? Neither the historical record nor the past behavior of the Bush administration holds out much hope for improvement. True, President Bush uttered conciliatory words during his victory remarks and in his press conference on Nov. 4. But messages encoded in those same speeches sent the usual winks and nudges to the GOP faithful that there was little reason to fear any deviation from the sharp rightward tack the country has been sailing on since 2001.
As Bush's people have been repeating to anyone who will listen, second-term presidents are a relative rarity in American history. Political chief Karl Rove said -- correctly -- that winning reelection is a crucial step toward ranking as a great or near-great president. It is surprising to go through the roster and see how many impressive presidents failed this simple-seeming test (Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, among others). In the last century, only seven presidents won reelection: Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and now Bush. In nearly every case, however, reelection brought with it unexpected difficulties. A paradox emerges: Presidents need reelection to rank with the immortals, yet almost all reelected presidents sustained devastating setbacks in their second term that compromised their reputations.
Although all presidents are different, a glance at the second-termers reveals some interesting parallels, beginning with the intensely ideological president whom Bush resembles more than he cares to admit. Woodrow Wilson is chiefly remembered today for leading the United States into World War I, which in fact happened not long after his second term began in 1917 (violating the implied pledge of his campaign to keep us out of war). To be sure, that effort and the diplomatic negotiations that followed enlarged his and America's reputation. But a series of miscues caused great damage, beginning with Wilson's embarrassing failure to secure congressional approval for the League of Nations.
And that was only the beginning of his problems. A historian examining America in 1918 and 1919, expecting to find a nation basking in military victory, instead finds a people roiled by debates over civil liberties, women's rights, influenza epidemics and idiotic nostrums intended to restore a sense of prewar tranquillity (Prohibition). While embroiled in the League debate -- a fight he lost because of his unwillingness to admit mistakes or work with the opposition -- Wilson also surrendered his administration's prestige by tolerating an abusive attorney general willing to suspend civil liberties in order to bully critics. Broken by the League battle and the health problems he incurred while fighting it, Wilson was unable to provide robust leadership when America desperately needed it, long after the military parades were over.
FDR was too smart to fall into any of those traps, but there is no denying that his second term was far from his most glorious. His most famous failing was the controversy over packing the Supreme Court, a rare case of tone-deafness (though his threat to add up to six new judges to the Supreme Court did make the Court more reasonable). His second term also saw a distressing recession, in 1937-38, and serious difficulties working with an isolationist Congress that wanted no part of FDR's preparation for war.
This is the parallel Bush and his handlers would like applied to them, as if opposition to the poorly conceived Iraq war is "appeasement." But it is utterly ahistorical -- and insulting to World War II veterans and Holocaust survivors -- to compare Hitler and his allies to Saddam Hussein, the tin-pot dictator of a nation whose gross domestic product was roughly equal to Kentucky's.
Twenty years later, in 1956, Dwight Eisenhower easily won reelection, but he too was weakened by a series of unexpected setbacks. Inflation and recession frustrated Americans eager to support growing families; and unpleasant surprises, from sources both domestic (the controversy over integrating Little Rock Central High School) and otherworldly (Sputnik), made life much tenser than our sugarcoated memories of the 1950s allow. The Republicans suffered severe setbacks in the 1958 midterm elections, and the disastrous U-2 incident gave John F. Kennedy plenty of ammunition for his charges of mismanagement during the 1960 campaign.
Richard Nixon, of course, offers the classic example of how not to lead a second term. Watergate is Exhibit A, but that hardly begins to describe the list of problems that Nixon -- reelected by a landslide -- had to confront when he returned to work in 1973. Record inflation and a plunging stock market combined to depress spending power, but nothing hurt Americans more than the energy crisis, which seemed for a few months to portend the beginning of a new post-automotive age.
Ronald Reagan's reelection in 1984 was nearly as overwhelming, but he too turned in a surprisingly poor performance in his second term. Reagan deserves credit for his arms talks with Mikhail Gorbachev, but like his Republican predecessors he presided over a badly slumping stock market, and as the unsavory details of the Iran-Contra scandal unfolded, Reagan seemed so out of touch that audiences were almost relieved when his public appearances were curtailed.
The story of Bill Clinton's second term remains difficult to tell objectively because the partisan emotions of that time remain deeply felt on both sides. Undeniably, what was by far his worst moment as president -- the Monica Lewinsky scandal -- fell squarely in the second term. But unlike all of his two-term predecessors in the 20th century, Clinton presided over an economy that was improving, and improving rapidly. To the surprise of weathered observers of politics, his public support increased dramatically throughout the scandal and impeachment process, and Democrats scored impressive wins in 1998 -- the last time they have done so. Furthermore, Clinton forced through an array of impressive achievements at home and abroad that showed a president who had clearly grown into the job, unlike Reagan, Nixon and Eisenhower. The Republicans still like to argue that the recession of 2001 began on Clinton's watch. But even if that debatable point is conceded, it seems clear that Clinton maintained his grip on the levers of government as effectively as any second-term president since FDR.
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