22nd Repealed; Has This Campaign Changed Your Mind About Bill?

Great Debates
21

[QUOTE=buttonjockey308]
Not in the traditional sense, but essentially the man and his party sued their way into 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in the 2K election. That put our little democratic experiment on the slope, and I wouldn’t put it past GeeDub, or the Pubbies to provide the grease and a little forward motion.
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The machinations of 2000 are nothing new. Look at the 1876 election.

Will is not the same thing as capability. Bush might be the sort who would be happy to be a dictator, but that does not make him capable of being a dictator. And the 22nd Amendment’s repeal wouldn’t help him overthrow the Constitution.

Just consider two points:

  1. Imagine that the 22nd Amendment limited a President to THREE terms. Do you really think Bush would be more powerful in a third term, at this point, than he was in his first two? Shit, I don’t even think he’d win the election.

  2. If there was no 22nd Amendment, George W. Bush would likely never have been President if the first place. Bill Clinton would have easily won a third term against Bush if he’d wanted it. The 2000 result you didn’t like might have been avoided had the American people been given the chance to elect the guy they really wanted as President - William Jefferson Clinton.

22

It all depends on what the election was and who he was running against. In the Democratic primary, I would have voted for Obama or Edwards or Richardson or Dodd or Biden or Kuchinch or Gravel before voting for either Clinton. If it was the general election, Bill Clinton v McCain, I’d vote for Bill. He was a good and effective president in the 1990s. But this isn’t the 1990s anymore, the world has changed and Bill is eight years older. I don’t believe he would be nearly as effective in the 2010s as he was in the 1990s.

I am against repeal of this amendment. If you can’t get your agenda at least mostly done in eight years, another four years won’t make much difference and it will be time to put someone else in with new ideas. Besides, this guards against truly evil men seeking a third, fourth, fifth etc terms.

23

He was certainly the best president in my lifetime (I was born under Nixon - not a great place to be), and arguably the best America has ever had, so I wouldn’t have any qualms about him being back in the saddle.

24

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
arguably the best America has ever had
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That seems an extraordinary claim. What propels Clinton over the likes of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR in your opinion?

25

[QUOTE=BobLibDem]
That seems an extraordinary claim. What propels Clinton over the likes of Washington, Lincoln, and FDR in your opinion?
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I’m not certain that in my opinion he would, necessarily, rank higher than Lincoln or FDR. However, I could see an argument being made for it, based on his economic and foreign policy records. That’s why I said “arguably.”

That said, I can’t think of much about Washington’s presidency that would make me rank him among the best. I’ve always been a fan of Lincoln’s, too, but one can easily develop a list of deficiencies regarding his presidency. As it becomes more and more fashionable to revise history in order to take credit away from FDR (again, although not in my book) for the recovery from the Great Depression, it will be harder to arguably rank him among the best. I hope that doesn’t happen, because he was a great progressive and a great president.

26

[QUOTE=Hentor the Barbarian]
That said, I can’t think of much about Washington’s presidency that would make me rank him among the best.
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Actually keeping the United States together as a sovereign nation was an accomplishment of monumental proportions. Washington presided over what was, even post-Constitution ratification, more a mob of independent states than a clearly cohesive nation-state. It was quite an accomplishment to keep it together long enough for the glue to set.

27

No way I’d vote for Bill Clinton for the nomination, but I’d back him in the election.

Remember how, during or just after Reagan’s Presidency, a lot of conservatives were advocating for repeal of the 22nd? If they’d been successful, it would have taken effect in time for Clinton to run for a third term in 2000.

If only.

28

I liked Clinton and thought he was a good President. I’d vote for him a third time.

But I’m totally opposed to any repeal of the 22nd Amendment during George W. Bush’s lifetime.

29

[QUOTE=Little Nemo]
I liked Clinton and thought he was a good President. I’d vote for him a third time.

But I’m totally opposed to any repeal of the 22nd Amendment during George W. Bush’s lifetime.
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This is a ludicrous stance. One should never decide whether or not to alter the constitution based on one man.

I side with RickJay here, our country was an old one when we passed the 22nd Amendment. In all that time, a single man served more than 8 years as President, FDR. Primarily this was fueled by the fact that the Republicans nominated some terrible candidates, and that FDR was providing consistent leadership in a very long period of crisis.

If the American Civil War had continued on until the end of Lincoln’s second term in office (had Lincoln not been assassinated, obviously) I do not doubt Lincoln would have ran for and won a third term. There are rare cases in history where I think one man was the leader of the hour. Lincoln was that man, and there would have been nothing egregious about a third term to Lincoln’s Presidency.

But, if you look at our history only a few men have ever tried for third terms. Ulysses S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman (discounting FDR who we have already established as having served a full three terms and a small part of a fourth.) Of interesting note is by-and-large, all three of these men essentially lost their bids to become President for a third term because of the internal workings of their party.

Party members by tradition had come to expect that a President would serve two terms and move on, this was the tradition. Influential party members would naturally start to feel like it was “their turn” after the second term was over, regardless of the 22nd Amendment. Grant lost his party’s renomination, Theodore Roosevelt lost his party’s renomination, and Truman did so poorly in the early primary season he gave up his efforts. Note that Roosevelt continued on as an independent after the Republican party rebuked him (he essentially had won all the primaries and State caucuses but lost because of his era’s equivalents of superdelegates, not an situation unlike the one some Dopers fear Obama could land in), but I don’t view Roosevelt as having lost to Woodrow Wilson, I think he primarily lost because the GOP refused to nominate him and instead nominated Taft. Had he been nominated I think he would have defeated Wilson, as it was I think Roosevelt knew he was splitting the Republican vote and did not care–at that point he wanted to keep Taft out of office.

In any case I think the point is clear, American politics is not very receptive to people running for a third term. History also shows how difficult it is to even win a second term.

30

It has definitely changed my opinion about him being a good campaigner, it sure seems like he has lost his touch in that department. I still think he’d make a great president though.