Clinton v. Obama, 2012

Though I'm not predicting it at this point, a Hillary Clinton insurgency against President Obama doesn't seem so outside the realm of possibility -- not in the Democratic Party. The speculation is occasioned by the remarkable Gallup poll of September '10 finding that just 52 percent -- of Democrats -- would vote to re-nominate Obama for president, to 37 percent for Clinton. In fact there've been quite a lot of one-termers and contested re-nominations on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War.

Clinton of course had two terms, but it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in both his elections of a strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot that split the anti-Clinton vote and put Clinton in the White House with 43 percent and 49 percent of the popular vote. And a third-party candidacy as substantial as Perot's is not a usual thing historically.

Carter had a serious primary challenge in '80 from Ted Kennedy which might have gone to Kennedy had he not fallen on his face in the 60 Minutes interview when he couldn't answer the question of why he was running, and of course the Chappaquiddick business didn't help. Carter was only weakened the more by that challenge and wound up losing the general election to Reagan so badly that he conceded before the polls had closed on the West Coast.

Johnson finished out the last year of John Kennedy's term and then won a term of his own in '64, but he was counted as a one-term president and eligible for re-election in 1968 when the writing on the wall was so apparent to even him that he announced, "I will not seek, nor will I accept, the nomination" of the Democratic Party. Johnson would have been challenged from his Left by Bobby Kennedy among others, and indeed the Democratic National Convention that year was a circus and the Democrat Party was radicalized and banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.

Kennedy was of course assassinated about three years into his only term, so that example can be left out of consideration.

Which leaves Truman. Truman filled out three-quarters of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and then won a term of his own in '48 but was eligible for a second term in '52, until he lost the Democrat primary in New Hampshire to Estes Kefauver, saw the writing on the wall, and declined to offer for re-election. The Democrats nominated Adelai Stevenson later that year to lose to Eisenhower.

So Bill Clinton is the only proper two-termer the Democrats have had since FDR in the '30s and '40s, and even Clinton needed a historically-anomalous third-party candidacy to give him a push across the finish line.

On the other side in the same period are Bush 43, Bush 41, Reagan, Ford, Nixon, and Eisenhower. Bush 43, Reagan, Nixon, and Eisenhower were all elected to two terms, though Nixon didn't finish out his second. Ford assumed the presidency to fill out that second Nixon term, was challenged seriously in the '76 Republican primary by Reagan, and gave way to the Carter interregnum. But Ford doesn't exactly fit in this scheme on account of he was never elected. Which leaves George H. W. Bush, who was a one-termer and the object of a spirited Republican primary in '92 from Pat Buchanan among others, though Bush 43 suffered from the same Perot phenomenon that aided Clinton.

And that's it: the one-termers and the contested re-nominations have tended to be on the Democrat side in the six decades since the Second World War, and in fact that kind of thing has been the rule rather than the exception with Democrat presidents.

I wrote when Obama clinched the Democrat nomination in June of '08 that "the Democrat Party has made a mistake". That must have looked foolish when Obama won the presidency that November with supermajorities in both houses of Congress, but it was one of the shrewder assessments I've ever made. Obama was unqualified and unprepared for the presidency, his instincts are consistently and suicidally wrong, his ideas are unworkable and alien to the American nation, and he is unusually vain and bitter and arrogant even by the standards of the sort of men who presume to lead the world. Barack Hussein Obama is a plain bad president, and he could only ever have been a bad president.

Obama is already a marginalized, discredited, unheeded, and failed president. He fell further, faster than any president since the advent of polling. His campaign was a fraud, and the more he says and does -- the more he reveals himself truly -- the more abhorrent he is to the American people. I decline to say that the American people make mistakes, but they do sometimes have accidents, and November of 2008 was one for the ages. It will be put right at the first opportunity. The question is whether Obama marks the end of leftism in American national government, and the rebirth of First Principles, for a couple of election cycles, or for a generation.

So Obama is a one-term president, though the details have yet to be written. If he tells the American people that they can't fire him, he quits, or if he takes his chances on a re-election and the Democratic Party does to him as the mob does to a fellow who's outlived his usefulness, then the obvious alternate standard-bearer will be the the one they now know they ought to have nominated in the first place. Only, that assumes Hillary Clinton would want another run at the presidency, but my assumption has always been that Clinton would never run unless she could be confident of winning, and in 2012 she would of course lose: if a party can't re-elect a sitting president, it won't elect a runner-up pleading that she's one of the good ones.