Fast and Furious. Benghazi coverup. Historically-low approval ratings. 6 wars since becoming POTUS. Godless, social agenda. Catering to white liberals on everything. Blacks faring better under Bush than Obama. Rollout for Obamacare an utter fail...the list goes on. But if you're a rabid Obamabot, surely it's a "RACIST!!!" GOP and that nonsensical 22nd Amendment that's
holding Barry O. back from being the best POTUS he could be:
Last week Frank J. Fleming,
one of the funniest bloggers around, tweeted: "At this point in the
Obama presidency, we were supposed to be talking about how we needed to
repeal the 22nd Amendment," which limits presidents to two terms.
We laughed and gave Fleming a retweet. On Wednesday we observed
that it's hard for a political humorist to keep up with the real-life
absurdities of the Obama crowd. To illustrate the point, along comes Jonathan Zimmerman, a historian at New York University, with an op-ed in the Washington Post arguing that we need to repeal the 22nd Amendment.
Now
of course the way this was supposed to work was that Obama would be
such an amazing president that he would come to seem indispensable.
There were people who felt that way about Reagan and Clinton in their
last years in office. Probably someone somewhere would still stake that
claim on Obama's behalf, but we doubt even Slate would publish such a
far-fetched argument, never mind the Washington Post.
So Zimmerman doesn't argue that Obama deserves a third term to continue his great success, only that "Barack Obama
should be allowed to stand for re election [again]" and that "citizens
should be allowed to vote for--or against--him." Where it gets funny is
in Zimmerman's resort to the 22nd Amendment as an excuse for the
failures of Obama's first and second terms.
Zimmerman
opens with a 1947 quote from Sen. Harley Kilgore, a West Virginia
Democrat, who "condemned [the] proposed constitutional amendment" on the
ground that, in Kilgore's words: "The executive's effectiveness will be
seriously impaired, as no one will obey and respect him if he knows
that the executive cannot run again." (We're pretty sure Zimmerman has
the chronology backward here: Kilgore's quote preceded the proposing of
the amendment and was part of the debate over whether Congress would do
so.)
There's no denying Obama's
effectiveness has been seriously impaired. As Zimmerman notes, the
president's approval rates have plunged--to 37% in one poll--and amid
the ObamaCare
disaster, "many of Obama's fellow Democrats have distanced themselves
from the reform and from the president." The administration's purported
recent deal with Iran, likewise, is drawing "fervent objections" not
just from hawkish Republicans but from Northeastern Democrats like Sens.
Chuck Schumer and Bob Menendez.
If
Obama were running for re-election, Zimmerman thinks that wouldn't
happen: "Democratic lawmakers would worry about provoking the wrath of a
president who could be reelected. Thanks to term limits, though,
they've got little to fear." But "the scariest problem of all,"
Zimmerman claims, is that Obama does not "have to fear the voters," so
that "if he chooses, he could simply ignore their will."
Right
off the bat it seems obvious that Zimmerman has committed a fallacy of
causality. We puzzled over whether to call it post hoc or cum hoc before
realizing it's a rare example of an ante hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy.
Zimmerman is asserting without evidence that events in the present are
being caused by an event in the future, namely Obama's leaving office
for good on Jan. 20, 2017.
Why is this
fallacious? For one reason, because it does not describe the behavior of
all two-term presidents since the 22nd Amendment went into effect. Only
Nixon and George W. Bush are generally regarded to have had disastrous
second terms. Eisenhower, Reagan and Clinton all had some difficulties
in their second terms, but none that proved crippling to their
effectiveness or poisonous to their public standing.
There
have also been disastrous one-term presidents--Carter for sure, and
we'd also count Lyndon B. Johnson. Because LBJ took office with less
than half of President Kennedy's term left, he was eligible to seek a
full second term in 1968. He withdrew in the face of a surprisingly
strong primary challenge from the antiwar left. In terms of his ability
to influence Congress, LBJ arguably had been the most effective
president of the 20th century, at least during his 1964-65 heyday. By
1968 he was washed up.
The proximate
cause of Obama's current decline in esteem and authority is the failure
of a project he undertook during his first term--ObamaCare. That he has
in common with Nixon (the Watergate burglary and coverup) and George W.
Bush (the Iraq war). Given that all three of these presidents sought and
won a second term, it seems far-fetched to speculate that the prospect
of a third term would have led to substantially better decision making
in the first term.
As for Zimmerman's
fear that Obama may ignore the will of the voters, all we can say is he
must've been out of the country in 2010 when ObamaCare
was passed. It is preposterous to suggest that so willful a president
would be more responsive if only he had the legal possibility of being
president for life. Further, it is difficult to deny that the
requirements of re-election in 2012 were behind the administration's
abuse of the Internal Revenue Service, the Benghazi coverup, and the
fraudulent claim that "if you like your plan you can keep it." Does
anyone think the prospect of a third Nixon term in 1976 would have
averted Watergate?
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