Is “really good one-term president” an oxymoron?
Obama has nobly declared that he’d “rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.”
But wouldn’t a “really good” president ordinarily be re-elected? And if not, why not? Assuming that Obama is not obliquely referring to illness or violence taking him out of the running, why would the public not vote him a second term if he’s that good?
I can think of a couple of possibilities. The first is that Obama is saying that voters are stupid and don’t know what’s good for them. And actually, that’s the second and third as well.
It is instructive to take a look at history. Leaving out those presidents who died during their first term and therefore could not run for a second, the following one-termers remain: John Adams, John Quincy Adams, Martin Van Buren, James K Polk, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Rutherford B Hayes, Benjamin Harrison, William Howard Taft, Herbert Hoover, Jimmy Carter and George HW Bush. If we study their rankings by historians and other supposed experts, as well as public opinion polls, we see that none of them were rated consistently in the top quartile of US presidents.
Several of the one-termers did fairly decently. For example, early leaders John Adams and Polk received a few ratings in that top quartile, and none that were low. But the others on the one-term list were considered middling to mediocre to terrible. So Obama’s scenario of a president who is rejected for a second term by the body politic but whom history records as doing a bang-up job seems rather a longshot.
But history is written by the victors. I think Obama’s definition of “really good” contains the hope that his presidency will pave the way for America’s transformation into a leftist country, and that in retrospect he will appear to have been a visionary ahead of his time, unappreciated by the troglodyte voters who rejected him.
I suppose we’ll see.
Funny, as soon as I heard that quote, I thought exactly the same thing! What a stupid comment from the “intellectual” and “really smart guy.”
(neo, nothing new but I swear you must hear me think!)
I think Obama’s definition of “really good” contains the hope that his presidency will pave the way for America’s transformation into a leftist country, and that in retrospect he will appear to have been a visionary ahead of his time, unappreciated by the troglodyte voters who rejected him.
Works for me.
Obama does seem to believe that voters can’t see through his rhetorical tricks and populist cons.
But Obama is in trouble when even Bob Herbert starts calling him out:
Right now he’s working on being a really crappy 1-termer.
i re-wrote this quote to fit the current times and people.
Socialist rulers have shown no disposition to abandon organized deception as an instrument of national policy. The practice is another legacy of Lenin embedded in Socialist custom. Just as Lenin admired terror, he extolled the ‘poisoned weapons’ of deceit, duplicity, and slander. He wrote:
‘The communists must be prepared to make every sacrifice and, if necessary, even resort to all sorts of cunning schemes and stratagems, to employ illegal methods, to evade and conceal the truth…
The practical part of communist policy is to incite one [enemy] against another…
We communists must use one country against another..
My words were calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, and contempt…
not to convince but to break up the ranks of the opponent, not to correct an opponent’s mistake but to destroy him, to wipe his organization off the face of the earth. This formulation is indeed of such a nature as to evoke the worst thoughts, the worst suspicions about the opponent.’
i mean if you never read the passages, you might be willing to pretend your smart by making up an explanaition that others who nver read will understand. but its not going to reflect whats going on!!!
you wonder why they are acting this way.. and i know why. they are following their leaders.
duh
the problem is that many think their imagination is a replacement for knowlege and experience. its the secular version of not admitting one doesnt know and filling in the gaps with god… except now we dont evoke god and angels, and a pantheon, we evoke some false erudition from false cognition.
if you never lived under it, or known intimately those that did, you wouldnt know!!!!!!!!!!!!! your education was stunted, and unless one accepts that, one will never get passed that. all the analysis i hear from most here, are from people who are making crap up and concluding on that. they dont know the history, the tenets, the tactics, etc.. .that they cant see beyond what they think they see is clear. they dont understand that obama is not playing to them, but to history. in 30 years, his tapes will no longer make no sense!!!
he dont care what you think… the soviets never cared what the masses thought.. they only cared what the prols thought who they played with to control the masses. but most think prols and masses are the same. and more.
Obama does seem to believe that voters can’t see through his rhetorical tricks and populist cons.
i explained this from the soviet era! and i explained this on severl levels… and in context with history and ideology. but the confounded love to be confounded. its like rubix cube to them. dont tell me the answer, i have to work it out myself.
i had already explained that the russian people didnt belive their propaganda and games of the leaders completely either. so what was the point? the point was after your dead, the history will reflect that those speaches and things will be correct. that is, just as they hid 60 million tortured to death by stalin and that history is almost erased. they will erase the information that YOU know now and can use to say… doesnt he know? and when a student in 20 years looks and sees the clips, we can be sure that it will no longer look out of place to them.
why?
because they will not have the information that you have to say that
just as you dont have the information to understand why i explain what i do!!!
big fleas have upon their backs
little fleas that bite them
and little fleas have littler fleas
and so on ad infinitum.
the future kids are to you as you are to me.
James Polk isn’t given the credit he is due. Unlike all the other 1-termers here, he did not seek second term at all! He went to Washington with a list of things he wanted to accomplish, then when did did them, he left. If only other leaders would do the same.
“good one-term president”–niche catch!
The one-term president approach also explains the heedless way that Obama has burned through most of his political capital in a single year.
Another interesting quote came from David Axelrod this weekend when discussing the President and his future agenda.
I was stunned when he actually qualified his discussion of said future when he said, “….should the President decide to run for re-election…” Anyone ever heard ANYone in this administration say anything like this before? Caution and worrying about the appearance of taking things for granted definitely is not a hallmark of Obama’s Presidency!
In same vein, Obama made comment yesterday(?) in response to the fear beginning to permeate the Democratic ranks (retirements, decisions not to run like Beau Biden and others…) They apparently (and finally) are facing the reality that a purge of Democrats in Congress might very well happen in the midterm elections — much as happened during the Clinton years. Obama addressed the Democrats by enlightening them: ” The difference is that this time you have me.”
So much for caution and concern for the public’s perception of arrogance! In fact, there is no limit to his ego and arrogance and his absolute determination to complete his agenda. Period. Never mind The People. The above statement dovetails perfectly with the one cited in neo’s post. He tells us, in essence, that really, everything he does is not about governing and leading the American people. It’s all about HIM! And he’ll be the first to remind you!
Note to O from Inigo Montoya: “I do not think it (really good one-term president) means, what you think it means.”
pablo panadero: Then I guess Polk should be taken off my list, if he didn’t seek a second term but might have gotten one. That leaves John Adams as the only one with a pretty good rating who was a one-termer and sought a second term unsuccessfully.
Of course, he lost to Thomas Jefferson, so we can say he had some pretty strong competition.
neo, nothing new but I swear you must hear me think!
a faux icanhascheeseburger line might be:
she’s in ur mind, giving u thots.
“should he decide to run again”
Wow! He’s bored already? He spent over 3/4 of a billion to get the job and now he doesn’t like it. I guess it was more fun back in Chicago hanging around and slinging the bull with his peers.
Guess what, Barry, you don’t have to hang around for us. We can tear up that 4-year contract. Write another book. Help Michelle in the vegie garden. Work on your bowling. Whatever.
expat: Obama gets bored easily, especially with jobs.
And with lowlifes from suburbia and flyover country. Good heavens, we don’t even know how to bow after all the examples he’s given us.
I still say it’s 50-50 that Obama leaves office before his term is up.
As it turns out, he’s not good at being President.
huxley
As Yogi would say, it’s deja vu all over again: hard to believe it was only 6 weeks into his presidency that Teh Won dropped this priceless pearl:
When Barack Obama met with TV anchors at a White House lunch last week, he assured them he likes being president. “And it turns out I’m very good at it,” he added. Well, not exactly. What Obama is actually very good at is campaigning. He did it for two years as a presidential candidate, and it’s pretty much what he’s been doing in the six weeks since he was sworn in. . . . Financial markets have already registered a vote of no confidence in Obama’s economic plan. But the political community and the public are reserving judgment. At some point, reality will intrude, followed by accountability. But not yet.
http://weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/016/215bpfvr.asp
I suppose the “yet” has now arrived.
Note, expat, that he spent 3/4 of a billion of other people’s money…
…he appears to be good at doing that…
I R A Darth Aggie– Excuse my ignorance, but what is
“a faux icanhascheeseburger line” ?
“I’d rather be a really good starting pitcher and get the hook in the second inning than throw a complete game.”
Makes perfect sense to me.
I almost agree with you Huxley about Obama’s 50-50 chance of not making thru a full term. I give him 70-30 (his favor). I figure a few successful terrorist attacks, perhaps failing a major crisis would be clinchers. Considering that more and more people are having doubts about his mental health (I know none of us here ever did) along with his demonstrated stupidity and amorality and by November there may be Republican candidates running on the promise of impeaching dear leader.
As for his hope of turning the US into a left wing dictatorship of the bureaucrat; one GOOD thing about Obama’s administration is that it is inoculating the country against leftism.
Maybe we should call him Dear Teacher?
South Korea returns fire from North -Yonhap
and obamas decision to put his missiles in poland with US troops right there on the border is got hackles up.
Poland is Cruising for a Bruising; US Eating Its Own Vomit
newsfromrussia.com/opinion/columnists/22-01-2010/111786-poland_cruising_bruising-0
maybe another reset button?
Throw away that reset button. It was all a sham and a farce. A match needs to be placed on everything to do with START, which won’t be worth the paper it gets written on. Absolutely everything in every realm with the US needs to start from scratch.
“The appearance of American soldiers in Russia’s vicinity will be a nail in a coffin in US-Russia relations,’ said military analyst Pavel Felgengauer.” Indeed it will be.
csimon
I R A Darth Aggie— Excuse my ignorance, but what is
“a faux icanhascheeseburger line” ?
I Can Has Cheezburger is a website that runs pictures of LOLcats (photos of cats with funny captions). The captions specialize in a lot of idiosyncratic spellings taken from text messaging. Hence
she’s in ur mind, giving u thots
is the kind of caption you might see with a LOLcat.
Here’s the site: http://icanhascheezburger.com/
Victor Davis hanson has an excellent essay on precisely the subject some of us are discussing over at
http://www.victorhanson.com/articles/hanson012510.html
If you are not a regular visitor to his blog you are missing some great writing, nothing compared to you neo neocon of course, but still good.
“Wow! He’s bored already? ”
No, I think that somewhere in his mind there is a growing realization that the President has to *do something*, not just talk good.
His old job, well he could have voted present, gave a few stump speeches, and fling invectives at the Republicans and he would have had a VERY long political career. He could have maintained the aura of being “The Real Deal” and people would have made all sorts of excuses for him not running – mainly how magnanimous he would have been for staying where he could do the most good.
As is he is going to go down in history as a one liner – first Black President and then hope that is the whole of his legacy.
I do think he is a fairly intelligent person. He is not knowledgeable or flexible, he is a pure product of leftist thought – indoctrinated and knowing nothing else. When it doesn’t work his only choices are quit or do it more, too hard to quit now (after all he *knows* conservatism is just plain evil). I think he is smart enough to realize what is going on, doesn’t want to admit it, and can’t figure out what to do.
If it were not effecting me it would be a grand case of giving a leftist what they wanted and watch it crash and burn. Frankly it is going about how I figured it would. I guess it is still a grand case of it, but it has a bad edge to it that I would have rather avoided.
I too think Obama plans to use his State of the Union address to re-connect with the middle class and to try enticing them (us) with a species of bribery. The question is, is it too late for him? I don’t know the answer to that. We will see in a few days, or maybe a few weeks. I kind of think it may be, but he is quite seductive–like the devil, who the Bible tells us will come disguised as an angel of light.
I go back and forth much of the time (if that wasn’t already obvious), but mostly I think Obama, with the Dems under him, is making moves to control this country in ways no one has ever even thought of before. It’s not clear that he’ll succeed. But it is almost certain that he is trying. Artfldgr presents the case, for those who have the patience to read him and in a fashion not always easy to follow, but persuasive nevertheless–at least I find him so. It’s important to remember that, in many of the great battles of history (both military and political), the eventual victor was apparently defeated upon initial attempts. But persistence sometimes pays, even though the results are not clear early on. The Russians ran through a couple of post-Revolutionary governments, including hapless Kerensky, before Lenin and his tireless Bolsheviks at last prevailed. Robert the Bruce was apparently defeated until he took inspiration from watching a spider attempt, repeatedly but initially futilely, to connect with the opposite wall to build a web. Joshua marched around the city of Jericho seven times before the walls fell. There are many other examples. True, Obama has apparently lost some major battles. But he has made it fairly clear, also, that he has no intention of giving up, of compromising, of doing anything but attempting to seduce the Republican opposition and their supporters. He intends to give no quarter, not in any way that matters.
Fear. Fire. Foes. Awake!
Sorry, I should probably leave well-enough alone, but I guess I can’t. I think we are in truth allies, but I expect Huxley will continue to consign some of us to the funny pages. I wish it were not so.
Let’s see. He’s willing to:
1. sacrifice his longevity
2. in order to quickly wreak havoc
3. to advance his cause
4. to which he is utterly committed.
He’s a suicide bomber!
neo,
Regarding John Adams and John Quincy Adams, I’d just like to point out that both were of the Founding Fathers generation, and during their lifetime they would have been competing for the presidency in a politically much richer and more informed environment.
Intellectually speaking, Obama would have been a goldfish in a shark tank if placed in their company.
He just would not have the judgment, life experience, sense of history, coherent political philosophy, economic experience, etc., to even stand in their shadow.
Still, such shortcomings have never kept The Won from criticizing them anyway….
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I would rather be a Free Trade Troglodyte than a Communist New Man.
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PA Cat wrote:
she’s in ur mind, giving u thots
I think the proper quote would be:
shes in ur mind givin u thots