“Terence Smith, in his commentary on this evening’s “All Things Considered”, mistakenly views President’s Bush’s current plummeting approval ratings in terms of some generic concept of second-term woes. This ignores the differences among several classes of post-reelection Presidential difficulties. I speak not as a historical scholar (I am a physician) but as an observer of the American Presidency since shortly after the Second World War.

Truman and Eisenhower were the casualties of historical forces in the postwar world which only coincidentally arose during their second terms and would have been daunting to the public perception of their adequacy in doing their job even if they had occurred immediately after their first elections… in which case we would not, of course, be talking about second-term woes, as we did not when Johnson was defeated by the public weariness over the morass in Vietnam and Bush Senior was done in by first-term economic conditions.

Nixon and Reagan committed scandalous abuses of their power after emboldened and corrupted in their first terms. Clinton’s scandalous behavior was in the sphere of private character failings but was exploited by his political opponents, having had time by his reelection to marshal their opposition. Unfortunately, significant segments of the American public have subsequently, hypocritically, forgotten to hold their President accountable for character flaws…

…Which brings us to George W. Bush, whose woes are not second-term woes, for several reasons. First of all, he was elected legitimately neither the first time nor the second time, in the credible opinion of many. Second, there is nothing about his failings that is specific to his second term except the reasons that it took so long for the American public to recognize his failings. His ineptitude, unpreparedness to govern, his deceitfulness, and his collection of the most unscrupulous cabal of advisers and managers, make him the uncontested worst president in the postwar era. Admittedly, it took the majority of the American public until the second term to make a realistic appraisal of his performance — a failing grade — but that was only because his first-term approval was artificially inflated by the political manipulation of 9-11, which created the most destructive consensus that opposition was disloyal and dangerous since McCarthyism.

More than two thousand American GIs and countless Iraqi civilians, to start with, have died as a result of this morally bankrupt deceit. But it is a mistake, of course, to focus merely on the war as the source of discontent. The coffers of corrupt corporate administration cronies have been enriched unbelievably off the backs of suffering Americans, our descendants will pay the price of irresponsible economic policy which has bankrupted our fiscal security. The abandonment of the unfortunate and underprivileged has accelerated at an unprecedented pace. The environment of the world has been irrevocably and severely degraded at a quickening pace. Multinational cooperation has been compromised by craven American unilateralism, military adventurism and abrogation of international agreements and civility. Goodwill has been squandered and debased. We have set a precedent for illegal detention and torture that other countries are certain to emulate. We have disavowed and undone a half-century of progress in the containment of the nuclear threat. Never before has an administration so egregiously limited the scope of the polity to which it considers itself answerable to such a partisan sectarian base. The list goes on and on.

Smith’s proposal for a single six-year term of office, which I hope was made facetiously, would not address the problem of the election of an unqualified, inept and duplicitous man in the first place and would compound the problem by prolonging his tenure, with no public recourse, for two further disastrous years. Four years of ineptitude is more than enough! The solution to Smith’s observation that, under the present system, the first-term President uses his power to campaign for his second term from the White House, is not to eliminate the only source of the remaining accountability an irresponsible President has to the electorate. There are other ways to contain partisanship in the exercise of Presidential power but, if partisan we are to be, a provision for a recall election of a President as scandalously bad as Bush would be a better Constitutional reform than a one-term limit, be it four years or six. Finally, it is telling that Smith starts his historical review with Truman, conveniently ignoring the case of his predecessor. Franklin Roosevelt, whose heroic presidency shepherded us through national emergency on both the domestic and the international front, illustrates the Founding Fathers’ wisdom in providing for reelection, especially when an effective leader has inspired the national confidence in times of crisis.

While Smith’s analysis of the situation may be a scurrilous attempt to reflect H.L. Mencken’s observation that “every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under,” it does nothing to help bolster the democratic process by warning the public against repeating the mistakes it made by being fooled into electing a man like George W. Bush. Both one-term presidencies, and second-term woes, are reflective of the debasement of the political process and the increasing difficulty the electorate has in assessing the character and leadership potential of presidential candidates through the slickness and superficiality of the campaign process. Campaign spending caps, frank candidate debates that are not opportunities for a dog-and-pony show, the inclusion of minor party candidates, a compressed campaign season to avoid the ad nauseum repetition of platitudes, legitimate in=depth scrutiny by a responsible and independent press, and the public determination not to get fooled again, would go far further in electing a man — or woman — of integrity who would have the capacity to govern for eight years, regardless of historical vagaries, without the public becoming disenchanted. Oh yes, and avoiding electronic voting without a paper trail, of course.

—
Eliot Gelwan MD, Brookline MA, USA”