The president’s
office is time sensitive because of term limits. No president since Franklin
Roosevelt has served more than two terms or eight years in office.
Mr. Roosevelt was
the only president elected to a third term; his supporters pointed to the war
in Europe as a reason for breaking with precedent. Mr. Roosevelt won a fourth
term in 1944 during World War II but suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in office
the following year and died. After more than a dozen years in office, the bloom
had fled the rose.
The 22nd
amendment owed its inspiration to a precedent established by President George
Washington’s farewell address and Thomas Jefferson’s aversion to monarchy. In
1807, Jefferson wrote in reply to a query from Vermont’s legislature, “if some
termination to the services of the chief Magistrate be not fixed by the
Constitution, or supplied by practice, his office, nominally four years, will
in fact become for life."
New York
Democratic Rep. Jose Serrano reintroduced
a bill in Congress early in January of this year repealing the 22nd
Amendment, but the bill is not likely to pass, however infatuated more than 50
percent of the American public and 90 percent of the news media have become
with wunderkind President
Barack Obama.
The presence of a presidential term limit presents both
opportunities and problems for the chief executive.
Mr. Obama was looking on the bright side of his lameduckery
when he whispered to then Russian President Dmitry Medvedev that he would have
"more flexibility" to deal with contentious issues like missile
defense after the U.S. presidential election.
During talks in Seoul, Mr. Obama “urged Moscow to give him
‘space’ until after the November ballot, and Medvedev said he would relay the
message to incoming Russian president Vladimir Putin,” according to a March 2012 Reuters report.
Two months after Mr. Obama begged Mr. Medvedev for more
space, Vladimir Putin was elected, for a second time, President of Russia. The
present Russian government, apparently unconcerned with Mr. Jefferson’s quibbles,
is a product of centuries of monarchical government, followed by a promising
but betrayed revolution, followed by 30 years of Stalinism, monarchy’s modern
counterpart. Mr. Putin and Mr. Medvedev have managed to satisfy an apparent
hunger in Russia for democratic forms by swapping jobs every so often, a modern
tyrant’s answer to the 22nd amendment.
Had Mr. Putin been running for president of the United
States, he would not have been eligible to serve, because the 22nd
amendment is a bulwark against proto-Stalinist chief executives; it nips in the
bud the megalomania of the larval tyrant by giving the president of the United
States only two terms of “space” in which he may ruin the country and bring
republican government to its knees.
Here is the hitch with lameduckery: At some point during a
second term in office, it becomes obvious to presidential supporters that the
duck is lame. At that point, politics pivots. During the second term of
virtually every president who labors under the austere restrictions of the 22nd
amendment, the president is found gathered together with his ardent supporters
during his first term -- including party leaders in the Congress -- and
everyone in the room realizes that there is but one lame duck in the room; the
rest of them will be running for re-election long after the president has strut
his hour upon the stage. They begin to think, dangerously, of surviving in a
political universe that does not include the nominal leader of their party.
This is a prelude to funeral rights, the beginning of the end of what the
French call “la trahison des clercs,” the betrayal of the intellectuals, in many
authoritarian regimes the footstools of megalomaniacal tin pot political
saviors.
Modern monarchical and authoritarian regimes, both fascist
and communist, solve the problem by having non-subservient intellectuals -- usually
violently or artfully repressed in authoritarian regimes -- shot or imprisoned
or socially castrated.
Authoritarian regimes fail for a good reason: The larger and
more omnicompetent a central
authority strives to be, the more incompetent it becomes; a government that strives
to do everything will do nothing well. There are no small errors in fascist or
quasi-fascist regimes. Even in Cuba, the balled fist is loosening: One half of
the Castro tyranny, Raul, a boilerplate communist, recently announced that he
was considering term limits.
In governments operating under republican constitutions, the
pivot, that point during which a party understands that the captain of the
ideological ship will soon be departing, occurs usually midway into a second
presidential term.
Assuming Mr. Serrano is unsuccessful in scuttling the 22nd
amendment, political commentators will begin mapping the ideological cracks in
the Obama administration around the second year of the Mr. Obama's second term. A
collapse in the economy will of course push the date closer to the beginning of
his second term.
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