Republicans are always in a snit about something, and in the 1940s it was that Franklin Roosevelt was elected President four times. The Roosevelt-Truman administrations kept them out of the White House for twenty straight years.
So in 1947 they put up the 22nd Amendment, which was duly adopted in 1951: just before Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. Eisenhower could have romped to a third term easily, but no, thanks to the GOP, he retired to Gettysburg.
Twenty years later they elected Ronald Reagan, and after eight years he retired to Hollywood under the 22nd Amendment. Maybe that was a good thing, as it was about a year after what would have been the end of the Gipper's third term- in 1994- that he announced he had Alzheimer's and began the long solitary journey of his last decade.
What got me thinking about this is that we have managed not only to stop popular, elderly Republican presidents from serving forever, we have pretty much reduced the George Washington-mandated second term to meaninglessness in the process.
From a long, interesting Ryan Lizza piece in The New Yorker on what a second Obama term might be like this, a paragraph sums up the vicious end-game of modern presidential life:
So in 1947 they put up the 22nd Amendment, which was duly adopted in 1951: just before Dwight Eisenhower was elected president. Eisenhower could have romped to a third term easily, but no, thanks to the GOP, he retired to Gettysburg.
Twenty years later they elected Ronald Reagan, and after eight years he retired to Hollywood under the 22nd Amendment. Maybe that was a good thing, as it was about a year after what would have been the end of the Gipper's third term- in 1994- that he announced he had Alzheimer's and began the long solitary journey of his last decade.
What got me thinking about this is that we have managed not only to stop popular, elderly Republican presidents from serving forever, we have pretty much reduced the George Washington-mandated second term to meaninglessness in the process.
From a long, interesting Ryan Lizza piece in The New Yorker on what a second Obama term might be like this, a paragraph sums up the vicious end-game of modern presidential life:
Whatever goal Obama decides on, his opportunities for effecting change are slight. Term limits are cruel to Presidents. If he wins, Obama will have less than eighteen months to pass a second wave of his domestic agenda, which has been stalled since late 2010 and has no chance of moving this year. His best opportunity for a breakthrough on energy policy, immigration, or tax reform would come in 2013. By the middle of 2014, congressional elections will force another hiatus in Washington policymaking. Since Franklin Roosevelt, Presidents have lost an average of thirty House seats and seven Senate seats in their second midterm election. By early 2015, the press will begin to focus on the next Presidential campaign, which will eclipse a great deal of coverage of the White House. The last two years of Obama’s Presidency will likely be spent attending more assiduously to foreign policy and shoring up the major reforms of his early years, such as health care and financial regulation.
As William Daley, who served for a year as Obama’s chief of staff, put it, “After 2014, nobody cares what he does.”
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