Is There Really A Second-Term Curse?
The phrase "second term curse" is so familiar that it's become a cliche of American politics. Whether it's President Richard Nixon's resignation or President Bill Clinton's impeachment, presidents tend to have a tough time during the back half of an eight-year presidency.
Nothing on President Obama's plate comes close to those historical examples. But right now the White House is defending itself against three controversies that distract the president from the agenda he would like to be pursuing: Benghazi, the IRS and the Justice Department seizure of AP phone records all have the administration scrambling.
Why do presidential second terms tend to be so fraught?
'Troublesome' Terms
Alfred Zacher, a real estate agent in Indiana, says there's no single explanation.
After reading about Thomas Jefferson's second-term stumbles, Zacher started thinking – obsessively– about the presidencies he had watched.
"I'm old enough to remember Franklin Roosevelt's packing of the Supreme Court and his difficulty," Zacher says. "Lived through the retirement of Richard Nixon and seeing Lyndon Johnson with his difficulty. I said, 'This second term is troublesome. What's going on here?' "
So Zacher spent eight years writing a self-published book, Presidential Power in Troubled Second Terms. By his subjective tally, only about a third of the presidents who won re-election had a successful second term.
"A rather prominent historian asked me last year: Which presidents had a better second term than first term?" Zacher says. He came up with two names: James Madison and Andrew Jackson.
The downward trajectory can be traced to a variety of different pitfalls, from wars to personal scandals to congressional gridlock.
Donna Hoffman at the University of Northern Iowa studies that last measure. After analyzing the amount of legislation presidents got through Congress for the last 50 years, she's dubious that the "second term curse" is all that bad.
"We often times see that there is a little bit of a drop in terms of what presidents are able to accomplish in the second term," she says, "but it's not such a drop that one would go, 'Aha, there it is. They're always less successful.' "
The drop is a little more than 10 percent. She says in a second term, lawmakers start to envision Washington without the sitting president.
"So their political fortunes may start to diverge in that sense, even members of his own party," Hoffman says, while members of the other party have more interest than ever in investigations and subpoenas.
A 'Scandal Backlog'
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