Victor Davis Hanson examines recent second presidential terms and finds them uniformly unimpressive, as readers of his latest National Review Online column have discovered.
Maybe the hubris of getting reelected convinces our commanders-in-chief that they are mostly beyond reproach. Overreach ensues. Then the goddess Nemesis descends in destructive fashion to remind them that they are mere mortals.
In addition, the more talented cabinet and staff appointees often bail out near the end of the first term. At best, they burn out from continuous 16-hour work days. At worst, they flee to leverage their former high-profile jobs through revolving-door influence-peddling, finding new work in media, lobbying, consulting, and on Wall Street.
Boredom, on the part of both the president and the public, takes its toll. Clinton was an effective speaker — at first. Near the end of his eight years, the public’s eyes rolled when he predictably misled, exaggerated, or became petulant.
Bush was witty and sincere in repartee and impromptu speaking but often stumbled over the teleprompter. By the end of his eight years, his critics were publishing books of Bush malapropisms.
It is hard now to believe that Obama’s banal “hope and change” ever set a nation on fire. Certainly by 2013, we have come to snore when Obama for the nth time laces his teleprompted rhetoric with “make no mistake about it” or “let me be perfectly clear.”
One-term presidencies — or a constitutional change to a single six-year presidential term — make better sense. A single presidential tenure might curtail an incumbent’s customary exaggerations about supposed past achievements and the phony promises about great things to come that are apparently necessary for reelection. Much of wasteful federal spending and general bad policy derives from the reelection efforts of an incumbent desperate to appease or buy off the electorate.
