PLANK NOVEMBER 5, 2012
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In Bristow, Virginia on Saturday night, Bill Clinton was the opening act for Barack Obama. As Clinton talked alternatively of “my presidency” and “my president” (meaning Obama), I was propelled forward to January 2017, when, if Obama is re-elected tomorrow, he will leave office. Obama will only be 55, and Clinton was only 54 when he left office in 2001. Obama, like Clinton, can campaign for future Democratic nominees, and perhaps create his own foundation, but much of the experience he gained in office will be lost – and, because of the 22nd Amendment, will never be reclaimed.
In March 1947, a Republican Congress passed the 22nd Amendment, and the states ratified it four years later. It denies presidents who have served six years or more the chance to run for re-election. It was aimed directly at Franklin Roosevelt, but it would also have prevented his ancestor Theodore Roosevelt from running on the Progressive Party ticket in 1912. Most recently, it barred Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Clinton from running for president again. The ban against more than two successive terms has some utility. It would have barred FDR in 1940, but it would have aided presidents like Dwight Eisenhower or Reagan, whose health was already declining, from being pressured to run again by their parties. But I can’t see any utility from the outright ban on running again.
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, “There are no second acts in American lives,” but there have been second acts in politics. In the U.S., Roosevelt was a great wartime leader during his third term. Would the country have been better off with Wendell Wilkie or whomever -- Henry Wallace? -- the Democrats would have run in FDR’s place in 1940? I doubt it. But there are also interesting examples overseas. Yitzhak Rabin was Israel’s Prime Minister from 1974 to 1977 and might have been remembered afterwards for giving way to Menachim Begin and the triumph of the Israeli right wing, but he had a brilliant return to office in 1992 when he helped shepherd the Oslo Accords between Israel and the PLO. If Rabin had not been assassinated in 1995, the Mideast might look a lot different and better today.
Charles de Gaulle was France’s leader from 1944 to 1946, giving way to the rickety French Fourth Republic, which produced 21 prime ministers in twelve years. In 1958, de Gaulle returned to office as President in the new Fifth Republic and lasted eleven years. De Gaulle probably overstayed his welcome, as Konrad Adenauer may have done in West Germany, but in de Gaulle’s first six years back, he wound down the disastrous war in Algeria, furthered the unification of Europe, and the rapprochement between France and Germany, and oversaw the rapid expansion of the French economy.
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The 22nd Amendment deprives the United States of the possibility of successful second acts. It has also made a virtue of inexperience among American presidents. The practice of having an entirely new president every four or eight years has led to flailing and mistakes during a president’s first year or two in office. That has been particularly true in foreign policy. Over the last fifty years, John Kennedy, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Obama have had rocky first years in foreign policy. Kennedy – Bay of Pigs. Reagan – Lebanon. Clinton – flailing in the former Yugoslavia and with Japan. And Obama’s initial Afghanistan policy was flawed.
Repealing the 22nd Amendment would not eliminate the possibility of presidential stumbles, but might lessen them, particularly if the country faced the prospect of electing an untutored new executive in the midst of a foreign policy crisis. I am not making an argument that Bill Clinton should have run again in 2004, or Obama, if he is re-elected this year, in 2020. Only that the possibility for them to do so should exist.
12 comments
"Repealing the 22nd Amendment would not eliminate the possibility of presidential stumbles, but might lessen them, particularly if the country faced the prospect of electing an untutored new executive in the midst of a foreign policy crisis." Of course, a sitting president is often the least detached to make sound judgments because she most likely contributed to the crisis. Jefferson initially believed that short terms (not term limits) would be sufficient to preserve democracy, but in later years came to believe in term limits because there would always be some excuse (some rationalization) for another term: "If the principle of rotation be a sound one, as I conscientiously believe it to be with respect to this office, no pretext should ever be permitted to dispense with it, because there never will be a time when real difficulties will not exist and furnish a plausible pretext for dispensation."
- rayward
November 5, 2012 at 3:38pm
I see an advantage in term limits for Republicans only.
- Nusholtz
November 5, 2012 at 3:51pm
I used to think that John Judis is a sober analyst.
- amidut
November 5, 2012 at 6:06pm
I'm not buying it, frankly. There are many more useful reforms we could put in place to make sure that we have informed, engaged and competent Presidents. BTW, the Roosevelt thing did not work out as well this article suggests - yes Roosevelt was critical in his 3rd term to getting the US prepared for the coming storm, but he was clearly not fit to run again in 1944, and the country would arguably have been better off voting for someone who was. You can pose all the counterfactuals you want about Wallace or Wilkie, but the truth is we don't know who would have emerged on the Democratic ticket or the Republican ticket, absent an incumbent Roosevelt.
- IowaBeauty
November 5, 2012 at 6:06pm
What this article wants to say is that Obama 2008 was unperpared and ill fitting for the job. After 4 years of learning on the job, he is now a more competent candidate, and it would be nice if Americans realized that the potential is only beginning to show now, treated him as if this were his first real term as a serious president, and give him a second (third) term to accomplish what the he will set up as an experienced leader in the upcoming term. This is retroactively an admission that Obama 2008 was really a very poorly equipped presidential candidate, which the conservatives said all time.
- Noga
November 5, 2012 at 6:56pm
This was a bit excessively long, and also a bit mealy-mouthed in saying that we should move from barring third terms to saying we should bar consecutive third terms. There should be no term limits, period. The case? Term limits are needless limits on people's choices of who can represent them, not because of age, felony convictions, or any other reasonable cause, but because the person elected might have too much experience in the job. That's all you need to say for it to be ridiculous on its face.
- janus
November 5, 2012 at 7:14pm
Does Judis think it better to try to amend the U.S. Constitution than reform the duopoly candidate nomination process? The process of the two parties fracturing and regrouping over time to accomodate unwieldy coalitions is tough enough for the nation to endure, but now the nomination process is just a money game. I do think that Congress should have term limits. 24 years.
- K2K
November 5, 2012 at 10:23pm
Is tnr.com rejecting the end of Daylight Savings Time, or are we posting in Halifax, Nova Scotia? Which would be ok. Just wondering. I just can not believe anyone is thinking anyone deserves a third term as President. Better to ask the UK if we can change our mind, join the Commonwealth, and rely on the Queen to conduct our foreign relations. Most experienced person on earth.
- K2K
November 5, 2012 at 10:38pm
(just before i read this piece i was wondering, in emails, about something similar. i was thinking about J Q Adams as an ex-POTUS who then served 17 years in the House. i was wondering about how unseemly it might be if Obama ousted someone to become a USSenator after his second term in the WH. (and i'm still wondering.) now i'm wondering about his return as POTUS again--after four years--as an alternative.)
- cdmcl3
November 5, 2012 at 11:54pm
cdmcl3 - these days, SCOTUS is the only possible return to the Federal government. In 2008, I thought SCOTUS was what Hillary really wanted, once O had the nom. My sole prediction at this point is that a snowstorm in Green Bay, Wisconsin determines the election.
- K2K
November 6, 2012 at 12:43am
hell, just get rid of the Senate and the electoral college if we are going to engage in pipe dreams. If you can't get rid of the Senate at least make it a hybrid of population and state, that is give Montana one Senate Seat and California 4.
- blackton
November 6, 2012 at 1:03am
When one considers the disasters he inherited and how far we have come, the stimulus that ended our economic free-fall and has produced a slow (too slow) recovery, the auto rescue, the financial system bailout, ACA, Dodd-Frank, the end of don't ask, don't tell, Lily Ledbetter Act, Obama has, by any rational measure, been an outstanding president, and all of this despite implacable Republican opposition with the stated purpose of unseating him. Obama appears unsuccessful because the hole we were in was so deep that he couldn't drag us out of it in four years with the Republicans doing their best to drag us down. I am hard-pressed to think of anything in foreign policy where things are worse off than they were when he took office or where Obama's management has not only the whole been adroit. He failed properly to take account of Israeli sentiments and public opinion? Very, very inconsequential. With Netanyahu as Israel's prime minister, what could possibly have been different or better had Obama taken a different approach? Absolutely nothing, except that Israelis would have felt even more securely smug that they can indefinitely occupy and colonize Arab Palestine in defiance of international law and the UNSC. Now, there is at least a shadow of fear that this will not last, as it will not. I consider that all to the good. Obama's biggest mistakes, in my opinion, were failing to take the measure of the Republicans, failing to recognize that attempting to compromise with them is completely futile, except as a gambit for public opinion, and even then not much of a success. The only way to deal with the implacable hostility of the Republicans is to win public opinion and use it as a club with which to beat them into political submission. This requires the constant and wearing work of cultivating public opinion as well as the good will of elites. Obama showed little willingness to do this in his first term. I hope he has learned. If he will devote himself to this political work, he will be a much more powerful second term president. Given what he achieved in his first term, we then have good reason to hope for great change. However, if Obama achieves nothing more in his second term than preventing the Republicans from occupying the Oval Office and returning us to the dark days of Bush voodoo economics, neo-con foreign and security policy, and ultra-conservative Supreme Court appointments, that will be more than enough. I would prefer Obama dead and embalmed in the Oval Office with an answering machine picking up the phone to a live Romney wreaking havoc on American life.
- roidubouloi
November 6, 2012 at 9:16am