Finally, can our next president have done something for a while other than nonstop politicking? The press caricatured Ike’s garbled speeches and Reagan’s B-movie reruns. But at least they did not go uninterruptedly from one political office to the next until being elected president.
The second terms of the latest three presidents have not been successful. Bill Clinton was impeached after his infamous lie to Americans, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
George W. Bush was blamed for the postwar violence in Iraq.
Barack Obama’s scandals — with his accompanying “limited hangout” denials — are ruining his second term: the growing IRS messes, the Associated Press monitoring, the NSA embarrassments, the Benghazi killings, the Syria bluster and backdown, and, of course, the Obamacare fiasco and the misleading statements about it.
What are other common denominators of this collective tenure of our recent presidents?
After popular first terms and reelection, they seemed to have lost public confidence and the ability to continue an agenda.
Do two terms wear out a president?
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.
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