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 won two terms, though it has to be said that he was the beneficiary in his first election especially of a strong third-party candidacy in Ross Perot, who split the anti-Clinton vote in '92 and '96 such that Clinton could pass through to 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 was the object of a contested primary in '80 which might conceivably have gone to Ted Kennedy had Kennedy 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 the challenge and wound up losing the general election to Reagan so badly that he'd conceded before the polls were closed on the West Coast.

Johnson served out the last year of John Kennedy's term and then won a term of his own in '64, but he was eligible per the 22nd Amendment for re-election in the spring of '68 when the writing on the wall had become sufficiently plain that he announced, "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president." Johnson had come within eight points of losing the New Hampshire primary to Eugene McCarthy, which result had brought Bobby Kennedy into the race. The Democratic National Convention that summer was a circus and the Democrat Party was radicalized and banished from the presidency for seven of the next ten elections.

Kennedy obviously was assassinated about three years into his only term, so his case can only be left out of consideration.

Which leaves Truman. Truman filled out all but a few months of Franklin Roosevelt's last term and then won a term of his own in '48 but was exempted from the 22nd Amendment and was on the ballot in the Democratic primaries of '52, until he lost New Hampshire to Estes Kefauver, 55-44 percent, whereupon he announced he'd not stand for re-election. The Democrats nominated Adlai Stevenson later that year and again four years after that, to lose to Eisenhower.

So Bill Clinton is the only proper two-termer the Democrat Party has produced since FDR in the '30s and '40s, and even Clinton got a push across the finish line by a historically-anomalous third-party candidacy.

On the other side in that 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 primaries 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 the object of a spirited primary challenge in '92 from Pat Buchanan among others, and a one-termer, though Bush 41 was hindered by the same 19-percent 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 sometime that November when Obama won the presidency 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.