When you think about it, Presidents who win second terms rarely have as much fun the second time around.
Let’s look at the recent ones.
Dubya Bush had the Iraq War go south, he had Katrina, he lost Congress and he capped it off with the Great Recession. He’d have been far more respected if he called it at one.
Bill Clinton had a bunch of petty scandals erupt in his second term, culminating in the Lewinsky Affair and impeachment.
Ronald Reagan had Iran Contra, and there were whispers about his senility.
Nixon, of course had Watergate, and didn’t even enjoy a full second term.
To drag this screaming back on topic, Obama doesn’t have any of the personal scandals of Clinton (whose Whitewater-related troubles started in his first term) or Nixon, and his political screwups haven’t (yet) remotely reached the level of what Bush got up to in his first term. FDR managed three-and-a-bit terms against the backdrop of a country in deep doo-doo. Obama can probably manage two.
People say they want to become president to help people, and their critics say they do it for personal power. The answer I think is a little of both: they want to remake the world, for better or worse. It’s hard enough for anyone to make a dent in one term; two terms is barely enough to achieve anything significant. But they all try…
Oh, no doubt. Anyone that gets into public office has some ego to begin with (that it’s necessarily a bad thing, mind you). I’ll be out there, busting my hump to make sure it happens again, that’s for sure.
For the same reason that, if it were a Republican president running against an incoming Obama would want it. What you say about Obama is what he likely feels Bush did, and that another Republican would repeat.
So what if you get caught in some sort of scandal? It’s not like you can be reelected a third time, anyways.
Because he wants to make sure that his lasting legacy - Obamacare - is not completely undone by the next president. As long as Obama is in office (and the GOP doesn’t have veto-proof majorities) he can make sure that it gets to the implementation phase (2014), where it will be significantly harder to take away.
When you add in preserving Medicare, solidifying Social Security, heading up any tax reform that might be pushed, it becomes clear why, to him at least, remaining president is essential for the progress of the country.
For that matter, you could ask why anyone would want to run for president at all. If you look at the candidates, most of them could probably make a lot more money in the private sector and not have to be put under a microscope, live in a bubble and have every word of theirs picked apart by the press.
It can be more simply said that incumbents are expected by their party to run for reelection. Part of running for a first term is the expectation, that if you win, you will run for a second. Any new candidate is really signing up for an eight-year gig. (Barring Johnson-esque circumstances, of course.)
Even though fatigue sets in with a two-term president, they do want to build on their accomplishments and try to get some work done without direct electoral pressure. There’s also the small matter of not wanting your successor to get credit for the delayed effects of anything you’ve done.
If your position is that Obama wanted to be president because he thought it would be a super fun time full of LOLs, then yes, he should probably quit while he’s ahead.
Here in the real world, where presumably he wanted to be president because he thought it was a tough job that he could do well at, he’s very unlikely to quit. By all reports he seems to be doing a reasonable job steering the ship of state.
The OP was clearly not posted in sincerity, or I’d bother going into more detail.
He also passed SCHIP, which has been a Very Good Thing if you think children should have health insurance; he presided over a limited and effective military intervention in the Balkans, and came closer than anyone before or since to engineering an Israeli-Palestinian accord.
The whispers apparently should have been louder in the last couple of years. But he also worked out a major arms-reduction deal with Gorbachev, pushed for and got a very successful (and revenue-neutral) simplification of the tax code, and shoved Ferdinand Marcos out of office, signaling finally that even under a conservative Republican administration, the U.S. wasn’t going to back every tinhorn dictator in the world that happened to be anticommunist.
As for Obama, he surely realizes that a second term won’t be fun: he’ll be lucky to enjoy any Senate majority at all during his second term due to the fact that both the 2012 and 2014 Senate classes are very heavily Democratic, and the way things are going, taking back the House is a longshot. But if he wins, he’d be in a position to veto the more objectionable legislation that a GOP Congress passes.
“I’m not certain I should be President, but I’m sure he shouldn’t”
-Barack Obama, after McCain’s suspended unsuspending his suspended campaign during the '08 election (paraphrased from memory).
I imagine he could say that but more so about many of the likely challengers coming up.
But in anycase, he had a fairly lengthy list of things he wanted to accomplish when he was elected. He’d done several of them, presumably he wants to try and finish of the list.
And while I usually kinda eye-roll when people try and psychoanalyze politicians, fustrations with the GOP and economy aside, he doesn’t strike me as particularly miserable in his current job.
The prospect of a Republican president, house and senate, is terrifying. They would turn the country over to the wealthy and corporations. Obama ha to fight to save some degree of balance. If the Repubs keep up with publicly caving to the rich, the people may figure out they do not work for them. They may toss the bums out. I hope the people are not as stupid and as easily manipulated as the Repubs believe they are.
I think Marley makes a big point here. Theoretically, in the second term, you can do what you think is right without having to worry about your own electoral chances next time around because there is no next time around. You really should be able to push your own agenda harder when you don’t have that looming over your head. Of course, you don’t want to put the party in a bind, but it certainly beats putting yourself in a bind.
Once you don’t have to play to the electorate to get re-elected, you can do the policies you really believe in. Obama was very articulate about his beliefs before he won. Then he back tracked . I am not sure who he is, but I hope he will fight the Repubs in his second term.
Of course, Congress still has to worry about day-to-day politics and eventually the president becomes a lame duck. But the president’s position does change. And for the record, when I said fatigue, I meant the electorate gets tired of the president.
You mean candidates say one thing when they’re campaigning and have to deal with a different set of rules when they’re in office? I had no idea.