4 years isn’t long enough to evaluate a President’s screwups, IMHO. By year six, sufficient time should have passed for a decent evaluation of the first two years’ policies. Of course, this assumes an electorate with a long attention span.
But seriously, both the Iraqi invasion and the country’s fiscal deterioration are more obvious now than they were in 2004, from the vantage of the semi-informed.
We can expect our leaders to run a political business cycle, boosting the economy immediately before the big election. A six year cycle would be less destabilizing than a four year one.
Neither of these two arguments is conclusive. Still, I see little downside. Mexico isn’t the most mature democracy in the world, but methinks its problems have little to do with 6 year terms.
Yes BUT Bush wasn’t revealed to be a stinker until his 5th year. Had the events of 2005 happened in 2004, the voters would have had their chance to vote the rascal out. If one can imagine a president worse than Bush, I’d hate to see the public go through six years of buyer’s remorse.
I don’t think it’s false and the implication is supposed to be weak. That’s why it was an implication rather than an actual assertion. Presidents govern both by dictating and by leading. Bush Jr allowed increased logging by Executive Order but tried to privatize Social Security by persuading the electorate to follow him. The point of my dichotomy was not to paint the President as a dictator but to make the distinction.
Nearly 2 years ago I started a thread asking how bad a second Dubya term could be where I argued that there is public pressure on a second term President due to the fact that the rest of his Administration still have political careers ahead of them so long as their boss doesn’t go over the deep end. So I agree with you. But indirect pressure is not the same thing as the person calling the shots knowing they will have to face the music themselves.
I’m not sure what the Dubai Ports thing has to do with the conversation. From what I’ve heard it wasn’t pushed by the White House but rather bubbled up to bite them on the ass. Had President Bush been determined to allow it to go down he certainly, as a 2nd term President, has what it takes to ensure that it does. All he had to do was bring the GOP congressional leaders in on it beforehand so they could get a jump on public opinion. Then those Republican congresscritters who face a real challenge in the upcoming elections could rail against and even vote against the President. We are only talking about around 25 in the House and less than half that in the Senate. Their desertions wouldn’t be enough to overcome a veto even if they managed to get a law passed in the first place.
The GOP congressional leadership has an excuse as well. They could just blame it on Bush Jr. Their President asked for their support and so they were loyal. Just pass the buck to the guy who’s on his way out anyways.
In defending a 2 year term I would respond by saying that…
Screwups come in all shapes and sizes. Some are readily apparent and some take time to gain the attention of the public. Thus a better tactic is to ensure that screwups can be dealt with ( via ejecting their asses from the Oval Office ) sooner rather than later.
Juicing the economy to aid in reëlection every 2 years would be even more destabilizing. So much so that the practice would have to be abandoned or at least it wouldn’t be the norm. Less frequent elections lessen the problem which allows it to be ignored.
I’m a fan of representative democracy, as opposed to direct democracy. This follows from division of labor principles: governing a country, like governing a firm, is a job for specialists.
The public should act like the board of directors: mostly they should judge results.
Furthermore, a two-year term would essentially double the amount of time the President spends on electioneering. This wouldn’t be an entirely bad thing, except that most of getting elected involves raising funds and stage management.
The vision of the President sitting down with the public and deciding what to do has always been a myth, albeit a useful one. In the real world, effective governance involves the deliberation of a minority, with rough accountability to the majority.
--------- Side issues: Screwups: I suspect that the long term screwups tend to have more relevance than glitches. Presidential missteps in the first 2 years of office are fairly common.
Cyclics: I should admit right here that fiscal policy can be counteracted by a skilled central banking committee.
Still, I suspect that more frequent elections would lead to less fiscal discipline: typically, it is difficult to raise taxes or cut spending in an election year.
One of us is missing the point. It seems to me that my proposal merely institutes a change in how the “board of directors” judge the President.
Am I misunderstanding your post?
Certainly a lot can be done to improve our political campaigns and I have definite ideas about that but really, that is another issue. My concern here is the amount of time spent looking forward to the next election rather than how elections play out.
Certainly. I am maintaining that accountability should be slightly less rough.
I was having something of a joke by referring to the bumbling office holder as the screwup rather than the bumbles themselves. Certainly Presidents make mistakes and should be judged by their overall performance.
I don’t think you should judge my proposed alternative strictly by the behavior of actors under the current regime. If the rules are changed so will behavior. Specifically, what we have now is a cynical system of “election year politics” where it is understood that nothing controvertial will be passed during the runup to a presidential election. As I alluded to before it is all smiles and back-slapping until after the campaign when the other shoe drops. I am proposing to eliminate the safe haven for taking unpopular actions when the next election is three years away. Our politics would have to adapt to a situation by learning how to govern when the next election is always on the horizon. There would be no safe haven to look forward to so there would be no incentive to delay controvertial measures.
It was supposed to be an example of the limits a President faces even if he doesn’t need to run for re-election. Bush did what he could to make sure that deal went through after it became clear the public didn’t like it, threatening to use his veto power for the first time and talking about what a valuable partner the UAE was and what a bad message rejecting this deal would send to our allies. In the end, even though he could have vetoed any anti-deal bill, he decided it wasn’t worth the political price and cut his losses.
In theory, he could have. Supposedly (and I don’t doubt this) he didn’t know that the deal was even happening in the first place. The example may be good or bad, hopefully you get what I’m saying in any event.
The other problem with a two-year term is that I think it would discourage Presidents from undertaking any larger projects. There are some ways that would be a good thing, but I think they would become hesitant to try anything that wasn’t showing instant results. In my opinion, we already have a problem with leaders shying away from necessary long-term projects for fear that the public won’t immediately approve.
The reason I was questioning it was because I was discussing the limits of what unpopular actions a termlimited President could take and the example didn’t fit because I share your view that this was an unpleasant surprise for Bush Jr.
When I hear people bring up longterm projects in a discussion of term lengths I imagine a group of immortals viewing the conversation with some amusement. From their perspective all term lengths are prohibitively short. What is a 2 or four or even a twenty year difference in the face of projects such as the generations-long struggle we face to return our environment to the stable state we were used to?
I argue that a shorter term would lead to a greater understanding of the need to maintain longterm projects. That is, being more sensitive to the problem would be of more help than a minor, but from a human standpoint quite significant, increase in the length of a term.
For that matter, who gives a damn about our environment? The planet will be gone in a measly five billion years anyway.
Here’s what I mean: with a two-year term, a President whose term begins in January 2007 is up for re-election in November 2008. That’s about 20 months in office. And the last couple of months before the election will have to be spent in full-out, balls-to-the-wall campaign mode. So anything a President does would have to show major results in less than a year and a half. Anything that would take longer becomes a waste of effort. A President up for re-election can’t go to the public, get on the stump and say “if you re-elect me, the stuff I promised to do for you will start happening,” he needs results. Twenty months does not strike me as enough time to judge a President’s performance.
Well, some campaign reform would help here. There’s no reason the entire election can’t take place over 2 months concluding in mid-December.
Did you miss Bush Jr’s reëlection campaign which Jon Stewart mocked as something like, “Reelect Me and I’ll Do the Stuff I Never Started”?
In a more serious vein, as I said before you can’t just assume behavior will remain the same when the system changes. People know the President has years to work before he faces reëlection now and they take that into account when judging him. If the President didn’t have that time then that is what people would take into account. Instead of a tradition of “First term, earn a 2nd term; 2nd term, get things done” we might have a tradition of “First term, get things started; subsequent terms get things completed or else”. A President may well have to screw up royally in order not to earn a 2nd term.
I think that would be a better alternative than a President who never faces reëlection.
