by
Patrick
J. Buchanan

Recently
by Patrick J. Buchanan: Is
Obama Shaping a New Majority?

Rarely have
second terms lived up to the hopes and expectations of presidents
or their electorates.

FDR’s began
with an attempt to pack the Supreme Court by adding new justices
and a second Depression of 1937. He was rescued only by the war
in Europe in 1939 and the GOP’s nomination of “the barefoot boy
from Wall Street,” Wendell Willkie.

What can be
called Harry Truman’s second term was a disaster.

In 1949, the
Soviets exploded an atom bomb and China fell to Mao. In 1950, the
Rosenbergs were convicted as atomic spies for Stalin and North Korea
invaded the South, igniting a three-year war Truman could not win
or end.

He lost the
New Hampshire primary in 1952 to Sen. Estes Kefauver, dropped out
and saw would-be successor Adlai Stevenson crushed by Gen. Dwight
Eisenhower, as Republicans captured Congress. Truman left with the
lowest approval rating of a president before or since.

In his second
term, Ike did better, but suffered a GOP defeat in 1958, saw Fidel
Castro seize Cuba in January of 1959, and had the U-2 shot down
by Russia in May 1960 and his Paris summit blown up by Nikita Khrushchev,
who berated Ike to his face. His vice president, Richard Nixon,
then lost the White House.

The Kennedy-Johnson
second term began spectacularly, with passage of all the Great Society
legislation. But, in 1966, LBJ’s party suffered huge losses. In
1968, that year of assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and
Robert Kennedy, of race riots in a hundred cities, and of campus
anarchy, antiwar protests and an endless war in Vietnam, LBJ was
challenged in the primaries, quit the race, and saw Nixon succeed
him.

After his own
49-state re-election victory, Nixon did not survive his second term.
Jimmy Carter did not get a second term.

Ronald Reagan
comes close to being the exception.

While he lost
10 Senate seats in 1986, he cut income tax rates from 50 to 28 percent,
and his summiteering with Mikhail Gorbachev is seen as a historic
success, leading to America’s victory in the Cold War.

The Iran-Contra
scandal – trading of arms to Iran for hostages in Lebanon – almost
broke his presidency. But by the time Reagan left in 1989, his popularity
had been restored, the Cold War was ending, and his vice president
was taking the oath of office to succeed him.

George H.W.
Bush was denied a second term. And the main event of Bill Clinton’s
was his impeachment and Senate trial for the Monica Lewinsky affair.

In his second
term, George W. Bush lost his battle for Social Security reform
and lost both houses of Congress in 2006, ending his presidency
with America mired in two unwinnable wars and plunging into a near-depression.

By January
2009, Bush’s approval rating was approaching the Truman low, and
his party had lost the White House.

About Obama’s
second term it is hard to be sanguine.

The hopeful
news is that, after four years, the U.S. economy appears to be recovering.
Progress is slow, but we seem to be out of intensive care and walking
the hospital halls.

The perils,
however, are visibly present. With its massive creation of money,
the Federal Reserve is taking an immense risk that as recovery takes
root, inflation may explode. And the hostility between President
Obama and House Republicans likely means no big deal to constrain
future deficits. Obama added $5 trillion to America’s debt bomb
in his first term, and his second promises the same.

This cannot
go on forever. Foreign and domestic creditors will one day demand
a risk premium for lending money to Uncle Sam.

But it is abroad
where the problems and perils seem imminent.

Iraq is drifting
toward sectarian-civil-ethnic war. Few are optimistic about the
fate of Syria when Bashar Assad falls. Even fewer are optimistic
about Afghanistan after U.S. troops depart. The Taliban of Afghanistan’s
past may be her future.

Notwithstanding
Obama’s campaign claim about al-Qaida being “on the run,” Islamism
and Islamist terrorism seem to be growth stocks in the Sahel region
of Africa, the Maghreb, and the Middle and Near East, all the way
to nuclear-armed Pakistan.

In East Asia,
escalating tensions between Japan and China are spawning a new nationalism
in both nations, and now warships and jet fighters of both have
begun circling the Senkaku Islands.

The
most immediate crisis may come this year, when a re-elected Bibi
Netanyahu and his neocon and War Party allies demand of the president
an ultimatum to Tehran, followed by U.S. air strikes on its nuclear
facilities at Natanz and Fordow if Iran does not capitulate.

Obama may be
dreaming of amnesty for illegal aliens and a Federal Gun Registry,
but most of us would settle for no more wars and no double-dip recession.

Remarkable
how the expectations of Americans seem so modest compared to what
they were when we were young.

Today, the
minimalist slogan, “General Motors is alive, and Osama bin Laden
is dead!” is enough to get you re-elected president.

January
22, 2013

Patrick
J. Buchanan [send
him mail] is co-founder and editor of The
American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books,
including Where
the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill,
Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide
of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his
website.

Copyright
© 2013 Creators Syndicate

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