We are a Twenty-second Amendment nation

However, conservatives would be unwise to take this as a massive repudiation of the president and his policies. The same poll gives Obama 45 percent job approval, his average level in current polling. I think what we are seeing here is that, once again, we are a Twenty-second Amendment nation. That’s the constitutional amendment, ratified in 1951, which limits presidents to two terms in office (or two terms and just short of half of another for those who succeed to the office on the death or resignation of the incumbent).

Some saw the passage of the amendment as a mean-spirited posthumous swipe at Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected to a third term in 1940 and a fourth term in 1944. I think that’s a bum rap. To be sure, there is plenty of evidence that Roosevelt was plotting to seek a third term even while denying that up until he was nominated at the Democratic National Convention in July 1940, as I argue in my book Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan. And one might dismiss Roosevelt’s private statements after he won in November that the third term was terrible.

But Roosevelt had a good excuse to run, one which proved persuasive to 55 percent of voters even against a very attractive and politically shrewd Republican nominee, Wendell Willkie. After the fall of France in June 1940, Hitler and Staling were allies in command of or threatening to control, with their allies Italy and Japan, most of the landmass of Eurasia. In the West only Britain was resisting, with uncertain prospects; in Asia, China was reeling under Japanese attack. The world was as close as it has ever come to the dystopic described in George Orwell’s 1984.

In those circumstances Americans wanted a president of seasoned experience and demonstrated capacity to retain his nerve in crisis. Whatever else you may think of Franklin Roosevelt, he was such a person. No one else in American politics was. And in the next five he demonstrated that he was a brilliant war leader and commander in chief.

But Americans still regarded (as Roosevelt professed he did in private conversation) third terms as a bad idea. The Twenty-second Amendment could not have passed Congress and been ratified by three-quarters of the states without support for Franklin Roosevelt’s fellow Democrats. Mean-spirited Republicans didn’t have the votes.

Interestingly, in its 64 years of existence the Amendment has bound just six presidents, and four were Republicans — Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon (who having been elected twice could not have run again even though he did not serve out his second term), Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. So far as I know, none ever mused publicly or privately about running for a third term. It also bound two Democrats, both of whom have done so — Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Clinton had some reason to do so: his second-term job approval was often well above 50 percent. My own view is that voters rallied to him during the impeachment debate out of Twenty-second Amendment principle: he had been elected to two terms and he was entitled to serve them out. Nevertheless, if it had been constitutionally permissible for Clinton to have run in 2000, I think (but cannot prove) he would not have been elected.

About Obama, there can be little doubt, given the Monmouth poll. Obama’s recent musing that he could win a third term was, I hope, just idle chatter; if he really believes that, he is delusional.

When George Washington decided to retire from office rather than seek a second term (to which he surely would have been elected unanimously), he hoped to be setting a precedent that would last hundreds of years. He didn’t do that, quite: Franklin Roosevelt broke precedent, in highly unusual and exigent circumstances, 144 years later. But the American people through the constitutional process decided that that would be the one and only exception. We are a Twenty-Second Amendment nation, as George Washington hoped we would be.