If Obama Is a One-Term President

By JULIAN E. ZELIZER
Published: September 10, 2011

“I’D rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” President Obama confessed to ABC News’ Diane Sawyer last year. Other than the “really good” part, Republicans would be happy to see this wish fulfilled.

With waning approval ratings and a stagnant economy, the possibility that Mr. Obama will not be re-elected has entered the political bloodstream. Suddenly, the opposition party envisions a scenario in which its presidential candidate could defeat Mr. Obama in a referendum on his job performance. Mr. Obama needs to think hard about his own statement and consider what it takes to be a successful one-term president, in the light of history.

One-term presidents usually leave office with their parties divided, the economy in crisis, wars unresolved, approval ratings in the tank and a sullen public rejecting them. Becoming a one-term president means joining a gallery of dashed hopes and crushed ambitions. Among those who were elected for just one term were men who, like Mr. Obama, came to the White House with enormous promise.

Nevertheless, accomplishments with lasting significance have resulted from some one-term presidencies. We live in a competitive culture that is so obsessed with measuring presidential leadership solely based on re-election that we often miss the ability of the losers, so to speak, to shape the direction of American politics.

Some one-term presidents pushed huge legislative agendas through Congress that remade public policy and survived for decades after their presidencies. They burned all of their political capital to produce changes that were not easily undone, because they created strong constituencies.

James K. Polk, who said at the outset that he wanted only one term, pledged to promote free trade and to re-establish an independent Treasury. Most important, Polk wanted to significantly expand the territorial scope of the United States. When he left office, he could rightly claim to have succeeded in accomplishing almost everything he set out to do; the size of the nation almost doubled on his watch.

Lyndon B. Johnson served slightly more than one term; he stepped up from the vice presidency on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had a little over a year left in his term. Although Johnson never got the nomination for a second term, he achieved enormous legislative and social change. Determined to outshine his model, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected an unprecedented four times, Johnson pushed through a domestic policy agenda of civil and voting rights, Medicare and Medicaid, federal education assistance, anti-poverty legislation and more.

Johnson, a vastly experienced and canny politician, always knew the political costs that might come from his policy successes. He understood that his civil rights advocacy divided the traditional Democratic coalition and offered fodder to a Republican Party eager to regain control of the White House by rejecting its Lincoln legacy and absorbing the followers of the segregationist demagogue George C. Wallace of Alabama.

On the night L.B.J. signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, his speechwriter and adviser Bill Moyers walked into his bedroom, unexpectedly finding him looking forlorn. “I think,” Johnson explained, “we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.”

In March 1968, faced with the turmoil over the Vietnam War and challenges for the nomination from Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Senator Eugene J. McCarthy, who had stung him in the New Hampshire primary, Johnson announced that he was withdrawing from the race. His justification was that he had higher goals, like trying to negotiate peace in Vietnam and obtaining a tax surcharge from Congress, that would require his complete attention. For years afterward, Johnson was a tainted figure in American politics, condemned by the left and the right. Yet the groundbreaking programs he put on the books remain.

At the height of the conservative revolution in 1985, the spokesman for President Ronald Reagan’s budget bureau, Edwin L. Dale Jr. stated, “I wouldn’t quarrel that Medicare’s been a success. In fact, much of the social safety net was accomplished during the Great Society, and whatever gets trimmed, the safety net will remain intact.”

Other one-term presidents left records that were not as sweeping as Polk’s or Johnson’s, but they still persuaded Congress to enact policies with lasting significance. President George Bush was responsible for a sea change with passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990, legislation that created a huge regulatory structure to protect and assist those who were physically disabled.

Herbert C. Hoover created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, which helped temporarily stabilize the credit system by lending money to banks and businesses, a precedent that F.D.R. built on. The one-termer William Howard Taft, overshadowed by the presidents who bookended him — Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson — helped strengthen regulations on big business.

Sometimes one-term presidents have been able to influence public debate for years to come. Jimmy Carter was one such president. Faced with economic stagflation and an energy crisis, Mr. Carter lobbied Congress to pass energy conservation legislation. In a televised address early in his presidency in 1977, Mr. Carter explained that good policy would require “painful” sacrifices. He implored Americans to change their consumption patterns and called for insulating homes and using solar energy. Although some advisers warned that this would be unpopular, he did not desist. Congress passed only a watered-down version of what he wanted.

Mr. Carter continued to tell Americans exactly what they didn’t want to hear. But on many issues, he was right, and his vision continues to resonate. He was similarly influential with human rights, a foreign policy that initially earned him considerable criticism from Republicans, though in later decades many of them embraced his rhetoric.

Other one-term presidents have made difficult policy choices with harsh political consequences. In 1990, after the supply-side tax cuts ran up an astronomical deficit, the first President Bush reluctantly agreed to a deficit-reduction package that included tax increases. With this act, he broke his campaign promise: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” But he was willing to take the political heat. Newt Gingrich never forgave him. And Patrick J. Buchanan ran against him from the right in the primaries.

Political consequences for difficult choices were also paid by yet another one-term president, John Adams, who backed off from a war with France. He rejected jingoism for prudence. Opponents inside his own party used his preference for peace against him.

IF 2012 is really the end of the road for President Obama, it is possible to see how historians might look favorably on his term. The president has already accomplished a great deal. His health care reform legislation promises to expand health insurance to millions of people and correct a number of flaws in our current system. His economic stimulus helped to stave off a second Depression and preserve the auto industry, while his financial regulations are meant to curb some of the abuses that led to the financial collapse of 2008. He has used executive power to strengthen some environmental regulations, while on foreign policy the killing of Osama bin Laden constituted an important step in the war on terrorism. Most recently, the role of the United States in the collapse of the rule of Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya marks another victory in the struggle against dictatorships.

But passing a lot of bills and achieving military victories is not enough. Making them stick is the trick. As the political scientist Eric M. Patashnik of the University of Virginia has shown in his revealing book, “Reforms at Risk,” the fate of policy reforms is heavily dependent on what happens after laws pass. This is especially true for one-term presidents, who usually fail to build political coalitions that can survive longer than they can. President Obama must amass some political capital to protect these programs, or he risks losing everything for himself and for his party. He can’t govern based on the assumption that he will have more time to repair things.

Since the 2010 midterm elections, Mr. Obama has governed from such a defensive position that he risks undercutting those gains. The president has to make sure that his embrace of deficit reduction through spending cuts does not jeopardize his health care reform. He must also make politically difficult choices, like following through on his promise to push for an end to the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, even if his close advisers fear that such a stand will blow up in their faces come Election Day. The president’s speech on jobs was a start, but the follow-through is critical.

In the coming debates over spending cuts, President Obama has to find the fortitude to outline the terms of the debate. He needs to keep his eye on what he did in 2009 and 2010, and not just what will happen in 2012. Otherwise, he risks ending up with the worst of both worlds: a weak one-term record and a loss in 2012.

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton, and the author of “Jimmy Carter” and the coming book “Governing America.”