If Obama Is a One-Term President

“I’D rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Obama confessed to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer last year. Other than the “really good” part, Republicans would be happy to see this wish fulfilled.

With waning approval ratings and a stagnant economy, the possibility that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected has entered the political bloodstream. Suddenly, the opposition party envisions a scenario in which its presidential candidate could defeat Mr. Obama in a referendum on his job performance. Mr. Obama needs to think hard about his own statement and consider what it takes to be a successful one-term president, in the light of history.

One-term presidents usually leave office with their parties divided, the economy in crisis, wars unresolved, approval ratings in the tank and a sullen public rejecting them. Becoming a one-term president means joining a gallery of dashed hopes and crushed ambitions. Among those who were elected for just one term were men who, like Mr. Obama, came to the White House with enormous promise.

Nevertheless, accomplishments with lasting significance have resulted from some one-term presidencies. We live in a competitive culture that is so obsessed with measuring presidential leadership solely based on re-election that we often miss the ability of the losers, so to speak, to shape the direction of American politics.

Some one-term presidents pushed huge legislative agendas through Congress that remade public policy and survived for decades after their presidencies. They burned all of their political capital to produce changes that were not easily undone, because they created strong constituencies.

James K. Polk, who said at the outset that he wanted only one term, pledged to promote free trade and to re-establish an independent Treasury. Most important, Polk wanted to significantly expand the territorial scope of the United States. When he left office, he could rightly claim to have succeeded in accomplishing almost everything he set out to do; the size of the nation almost doubled on his watch.

Lyndon B. Johnson served slightly more than one term; he stepped up from the vice presidency on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had a little over a year left in his term. Although Johnson never got the nomination for a second term, he achieved enormous legislative and social change. Determined to outshine his model, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected an unprecedented four times, Johnson pushed through a domestic policy agenda of civil and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, federal education assistance, anti-poverty legislation and more.

Johnson, a vastly experienced and canny politician, always knew the political costs that might come from his policy successes. He understood that his civil rights advocacy divided the traditional Democratic coalition and offered fodder to a Republican Party eager to regain control of the White House by rejecting its Lincoln legacy and absorbing the followers of the segregationist demagogue George C. Wallace of Alabama.

On the night L.B.J. signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his speechwriter and adviser Bill Moyers walked into his bedroom, unexpectedly finding him looking forlorn. “I think,” Johnson explained, “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

In March 1968, faced with the turmoil over the Vietnam War and challenges for the nomination from Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, who had stung him in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the race. His justification was that he had higher goals, like trying to negotiate peace in Vietnam and obtaining a tax surcharge from Congress, that would require his complete attention. For years afterward, Johnson was a tainted figure in American politics, condemned by the left and the right. Yet the groundbreaking programs he put on the books remain.

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Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, and the author of “Jimmy Carter” and the coming book “Governing America.”

via nytimes.com