Who are some two-term Presidents you feel might’ve been thought of much better had they failed to run for a second term?
Myself:
Harry Truman - No second term means no Korea (at least for him), no McCarthy hounding him, and only a record of epic wartime and post-war success.
Lyndon Johnson - His 1963-1964 term was a massive success and if he had declined to run in 1964 he might have been considered one of the best ever. 1965-1969 still had their moments of success and triumph, but Vietnam’s escalation tends to overshadow his triumphs.
Richard Nixon - If he declines to run in '72, perhaps Watergate only comes out later, he’s not forced to resign, and his domestic and foreign policy record marks him as one of the greats. It’s not like he accomplished much in 1973 and 1974 anyway.
Barack Obama - the successes of the first term without the foreign policy blunders and racial tension of the second.
Eh, racial tensions might have increased. However if they increased because a bunch of white nationalists can’t take it that a black man is still president it’s not like it’s Obama’s fault.
“We’re the most divided ever under Obama.” Yeah, because you’re dividing us.
However you want to term it, it’s brought a level of racial divisiveness to this country that hasn’t been seen in decades. There’s a lot of hatred and animosity on both sides now, which I don’t recall being the case in 2009-2012. There’s for example a Facebook Group called “Tales of the Mayosapiens” wherein Whites are labelled “Mayosapians” - to differentiate them from Humans. In this group, Whites are routinely mocked and belittled, and you hear things about how African Americans had advanced civlizations on par with Atlantis before the White Man emerged from caves and erased the history. You’ll go there and see people talking about how MLK was wrong, and Malcolm X (pre Mecca) was right. These are all young POC in this group mind you - not old 60s radicals. And I’ve seen this same attitude elsewhere - Whites are to be feared, hated, and belittled.
None of this is new. Facebook and other social media are bigger now than they used to be, which means more weirdoes and assholes speak out online. But they were always there. What do you think Obama said or did, specifically, to increase racial tensions in any way whatsoever?
I don’t get that either. The Iran deal and Cuba rapproachement were major, major successes, IMO. The Syria “red line” statement might have been a bit of a blunder, but at least he didn’t follow through with it and get us into another war just to prove he wasn’t bluffing.
Oh noes! White people being criticized on the Internet?
The must mark the first time in American history that a racial group has been spoken poorly of in polite company! Why can’t we go back to the good ol’ days when people of my skin tone were spoken about in hushed tones, using polite language like “you people” or “his kind?”
Obama didn’t have many (if any) major foreign blunders in the sense of a single consequential bad decision, but his overall approach was very much a negative. His turn to the “nice guy let’s all be more understanding” approach did not win him many friends in places where he needed to with them (e.g. outside of Western Europe) and was perceived as naïve and weak by enemies and allies alike in tougher parts of the world.
That said, it didn’t happen in his second term specifically.
Perhaps a better turn of phrase would be non-win situations for which he was blamed. Having the Syrian melt-down be Romney’s problem probably might have helped Obama’s legacy.
Syria, Russia in E Europe (which completely blindsided him) the rise of China which he handled poorly. Yemen. Africa rising which he missed.
Maybe if US Grant had declined to run for reelection? No panic of 1873 on his watch and he gets credit for destroying the first KKK and enforcing civil rights.
“W” for sure. Iraq would be Kerry’s debacle, it really blew up in W’s second term. Plus no Katrina and financial crises on his watch but on Kerry’s, see’s Jeb! win in a landslide in '08.
Grover Cleveland. If not for his non-consecutive second term, I wouldn’t have to commit any neurons to remembering the only thing that I know about him.
The problem with this as a counterfactual is that if the president gets re-elected, this is a judgment that they’re reasonably popular and perceived to be doing at least an okay job at that time. For instance the election of 2012 wasn’t really all that close at least in electoral terms; you’d have a fundamentally different situation if Romney had won instead. In other words if they’d had only one term, their legacy would have been that there was something wrong with their first term they shouldn’t have been entrusted with another one. It’s hard to see how the judgement of the first term is thereby improved.
All that said, the obvious answer to me for this question is George W. Bush. He could have easily lost in 2004 if Ohio had gone the other way, and that way Kerry would have been blamed for the subsequent recession and Iraq quagmire.
Not losing - just declining to run for another term ala Polk or Coolidge. If Coolidge had run for a third term, he’d have gotten the full brunt of the blame for the Great Depression. He bowed out a year before and so it’s Hoover whose name lives on in infamy.