The next election is over already
We’re in a bit of a silly season with a lot of political commentators that really should know better. For instance, George Will wrote an editorial saying farewell to President Obama, and it remains to be seen whether he can stand by its sentiments should Obama prevail in the 2012 Election, under the rubric of “changed man, ran counter to quote-in-quote ‘Progressivism'”.
Larry Sabato and and Alan I. Abramowitz play the game well.
Historically, incumbent presidents who have sought another term have won them by a two-to-one margin. Those aren’t impressive odds. How many of us would bet on a horse with minimal chances like that? Since 1900 only one incumbent president whose party captured the White House from the other party four years earlier (Jimmy Carter) has been beaten. The other incumbent losers—Taft, Hoover, Ford, and the senior Bush—were from a party that had held the White House for two or more consecutive terms. But the key is that Carter and Obama are practically twins; both won the Nobel Peace Prize. Enough said. Moreover, the present moment is unprecedentedly perilous for an incumbent president. There’s really no comparison in the existence of the American Republic, save for about a dozen crises like the Civil War, economic panics, the Great Depression, world wars, and 9/11.
Democrats may also place false hope in the fact that the next presidential election will have a turnout twenty full percentage points higher than we saw in the midterm—probably about 40 million more people than voted on Nov. 2. No doubt these “midterm-missing†voters are disproportionately 18-34 years old and members of minority groups, segments of the population that backed President Obama by margins ranging from 62% to 95% in 2008. Obama can’t seem to get them to cast a ballot except when he’s on the ballot. Well, yes, he’ll be on the ballot in 2012, but they’re likely disillusioned with him, too.
If you were reading that column, and you knew the form well, when you reached the list of quotations, you knew full well the quotes came from 1994…
… or 1982…
or… further down the track toward election date…
And the real reason for playing down this Truman impeachment threat is that (1) it won’t be necessary — the real impeachment is already on its way and will be delivered November 2nd. — John O’Donnell, August 9, 1948.
President Truman could resign. That’s specified under the Constitution. In that event, Republican Speaker of the House Martin would become acting President until Dewey was sworn in on January 20th. Dewey could be named Secretary of State and, in fact, at least, run foreign policy until he formally took over the Presidency.
—John O’Donnell, September 15, 1948.
I can’t get a good search on this particular columnist and who he was and what he wrote over the years, but I’m guessing that John O’Donnell would go on to fervously praise Senator Joseph McCarthy.
That “Impeachment” quote thing, I guess, is why these days Republicans wait for the second term to pull their “7 hearings a week over 40 weeks” to that end.
For a variety of reasons, tapping at the numbers and the circumstances, Obama has more favorable signs of political life (re: re-election) than did Clinton in 1994. Reagan, meanwhile, reportedly thought about not seeking a second term, a thought that strikes me as ludicrous for Presidential Egos but has been broached by one of the “Silly Season” news pundits:
If the president goes down the reelection road, we are guaranteed two years of political gridlock at a time when we can ill afford it. But by explicitly saying he will be a one-term president, Obama can deliver on his central campaign promise of 2008, draining the poison from our culture of polarization and ending the resentment and division that have eroded our national identity and common purpose.
We do not come to this conclusion lightly. But it is clear, we believe, that the president has largely lost the consent of the governed. The midterm elections were effectively a referendum on the Obama presidency. And even if it was not an endorsement of a Republican vision for America, the drubbing the Democrats took was certainly a vote of no confidence in Obama and his party. The president has almost no credibility left with Republicans and little with independents.
Couple of freaks.
The “Loss of confidence” is an interesting line, and I don’t quite know what it means. That his party lost a mid-term election is about the size of it. But if that’s all it takes — shoot, why not go ahead and throw in the towel and… as I saw one blogger sarcastically muse… resign along with Vice President Biden and enter in President John Boehner?
Naturally, such things have  been suggested before.
Soon after the election, Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas urged Truman to resign from office, even going so far as to suggest that the president appoint a Republican, Arthur Vandenberg, as secretary of state. (Under the law of succession at that time, Vandenberg would be next in line to the White House, since there was no vice president.) A former Rhodes scholar at Oxford, Fulbright  analogized Truman’s situation to that of a British prime minister who had met defeat in a general election after losing a vote of confidence in Parliament. Similarly, Fulbright reasoned, since the 1946 election had been a referendum on Truman’s leadership, he should turn the reins of power over to some prominent Republican, who could work with Congress and so avoid a divided government.
Both Marshall Field’s Chicago Sun, one of the country’s leading liberal papers, and the Atlanta Constitution, long the foremost Democratic newspaper in the South, counseled Truman to accept Fulbright’s recommendation.
So, the Republican Presidential Election…
The first debate in scheduled for the “Spring” at the (where else?) Reagan Library…
I hasten to suggest that for everyone’s sanity, as we watch the Reality TV stars and former “Greatest Strategic Thinkers since Winston Churchill” come for the fore with the middle-road Governors and (weirdly enough) Culture Warrior Senators who lost their last election by some 15 points…
if it’s going to have to be “Spring”, the date is June 20. For everyone’s sanity.