Americans like to keep their presidents for the full eight years

Daphne Caruana Galizia Thursday, 8 November 2012, 09:47 Last update: about 11 years ago

So Barack Obama has won his second term. Close as it was, I really am not surprised. This is not because I have any particular insight into American politics (I haven’t) but the odds, going on a track record that stretches back five decades, were that he would. Since the 1960s, every US president, with just three exceptions in highly particular circumstances, has won the second term he was permitted by the rules. And I think it’s quite safe to say that John F. Kennedy, elected in 1960 and assassinated in 1963, would have won a second term too, given that his popularity, in those days when the US media did not expose the sordid side of the president’s life and personality, was of world-iconic status.

In the event, Lyndon Johnson, who stepped in as president after the assassination, did win the November 1964 election and was president until January 1969, when Richard Nixon’s inauguration took place. So while, technically, he did not win a second term because that was his first election, he did actually win it as the incumbent president. Richard Nixon won his two terms, in 1968 and again with a landslide victory in 1972, but then went on to get involved in one of the most notorious political scandals of the 20th century, which has given the odd ‘gate’ suffix to practically every political scandal since, including the recent European Dalligate.

The first exception to the two-terms pattern since the 1960s is Gerald Ford, who stepped in as president when Richard Nixon resigned in the thick of the Watergate scandal in 1974. He contested the 1976 election but lost to Jimmy Carter. In effect, Ford didn’t even win a single term through election, but even though he was a fill-in president for just two years, his name and face remain memorable to those of us who were around then, even as children, because they were eventful years when America and the Vietnam War (and its effective end) dominated the news. His wife, an alcoholic, became almost equally famous, bringing alcoholism, until then a hidden affliction, into the news by setting up the Betty Ford Clinic for treatment and working to raise awareness.

The second exception is the hapless Jimmy Carter, who was president from 1977 to 1981. The chances that he would win a second term were practically nonexistent. This was the awkward peanut farmer whose unpopularity gave rise to the electoral cat-call 'Anybody but Carter'. He was popular at first – well, he wouldn’t have been elected if he were not – but ended up having to contend with the Iran hostage debacle, the catastrophic international energy crisis of 1979, the Three Mile Island nuclear accident and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (we’re talking the Cold War here) which led to the US boycott of the 1980 Olympics in Moscow. As fate would have it, the 52 American citizens who had been held hostage at the US embassy in Iran for 14 months, eroding Carter’s popularity because of his apparent inability to negotiate for their release, were let go just minutes after he left office.

Carter lost the race to Ronald Reagan, who then won a second term and stayed in power between 1981 and 1989, though his wife Nancy almost eclipsed him at a certain point. Then came George H W Bush, the third exception to the two-terms pattern, who served a single term between 1989 and 1993. That term was historically significant, starting out as it did with the collapse of Communism in Europe, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the end of the Cold War. Not that he had anything to do with any of that happening, but it coincided with his being US president and made him a particular focus of world attention.

The Gulf War in 1991 shifted the focus again, and kept him under the international spotlight. But when it came to the electoral race, none of those momentous events really mattered in the final reckoning of a sharp contest with the supremely charismatic Bill Clinton, who won two terms and stayed in power between 1993 and 2001. The excitement that surrounded Bill Clinton in his first electoral race was much like that around Barack Obama four years ago. I was at the US ambassador's house when the final count came in at around 5am in 1992 (dear God, is it already 20 years ago?), and she, a Republican envoy, was distraught to the point of tears. That wasn’t quite comme il faut, but not being a career diplomat she had probably decided by that point that she didn’t care anyway. She was going to show her feelings in public, and make no mistake about that. But after taking some time out of the room to compose herself, she returned as the perfect host, though I clearly remember thinking that perhaps we should all shepherd ourselves out at once, because it was like hanging around breakfasting blithely when our hosts had received news of a death. Why, some people even cracked jokes.

George W. Bush (the junior Bush), mocked and derided as he was in a zillion skits around the world and at home, won a second term all the same. He was in power between 2001 and 2009 (when Obama’s actual inauguration took place). And now we have Obama, with his two terms. If nothing bad happens, he’ll be there until 2016.

The Democrats and the Republicans may win as many successive terms as the people will give them. It is only individuals who cannot be president for more than two terms; this was laid down by an amendment ratified in 1947. After a president has been in power for those two terms, a new contender must take his party into the next electoral race. That the party itself can’t be banned from staying in power for more than two terms is obvious – or rather, it should be, though it appears not to be so to many in Malta who talk as though an elected government which has been there for more than two terms is a “dictatorship” and an “oligarchy”. To hear them talk, we should have alternation of power every two terms maximum, whether we want to or not and whoever or whatever the alternative is. That isn’t democracy. That, in fact, is a dictatorship: a government which you haven’t chosen, with parties in power switched by mandatory order every two terms. But for now, as they say, God bless America.