What would a bad Obama term be?

[politicaladdict]

I was just wondering I see alot of maps on this forum about if Obama has an excellent-term he'll get even more states, if he has a good-term he'll get about or lose just two more states, or if he has a bad-term he'll lose almost all states.

I know these are just predictions and are early, but I was just wondering what a bad-term would be considered?

If Obama just simply doesn't get us out of the recession, would that automatically, excluding if the economy gets worse and it will get worse or excluding, if there was a terrorist attack, would that be considered a bad-term with these "Stimulus" for nothing?

I mean Obama is finally letting Chrysler go bankrupt and even GM probably will, but the whole reason for Stimulus was to prevent it from going bankrupt, now he just simply has the power over the automobile industry for nothing. That's scary! 

And what if the economy gets better because of a possible 2010 Republican-congress win whom don't really believe in the stimulus, would the media still portray Obama getting us out of the recession or will people not easily fall for it?

[Rowan]

10% unemployment in 2012.

[politicaladdict]

Thanks! That makes sense.

I know there's for sure gonna be aneven worse Obama term(hasn't gotten close out of the recession with this big fat Stimulus) but will people wake up and figure that out?

[pbrower2a]

Bad term:

1. No economic recovery. Not simply incomplete -- none. Living standards plummet to Third World levels and get stuck there.

This is unlikely. Even the 1929-1933 meltdown lasted three and a half years. It's hard to imagine four or more years of economic meltdown; there are just too many objects to replace in four years -- from motor vehicles to major appliances, and certainly clothes. The hedonistic drives cannot be denied forever; people will find self-inflicted hardships (deferring vacations, not going out to eat) to protect savings impossible to continue.

If people don't spend on consumer goodies, government will do the spending for them. Obama gets away, like FDR, with any semblance of a continuous recovery.

2. Military calamity that the President could have avoided but got into anyway. Such happens often in history, and the details are never obvious going in. Heck, Iraq and Afghanistan looked easy.

How immoral is our President? Do you know something that I don't know?

If the calamity is not his fault (let us say, North Korea firing a deadly missile that kills a few thousand people in Seattle), then Americans will rally to the President. They did exactly that for Dubya on September 11, 2001. The war news from December 1941 - February 1942 was quite nasty.
  

3. Huge scandal of personal corruption -- such as bribery.

How immoral do you think he is?

... I'm not fully convinced that the stimulus package is the social optimum, but something has to be done.

4. Sex scandal.

Nobody needs to be reminded that Barack Obama can't get away with what Bill Clinton could get away with.  The snares are obvious -- plenty of pretty, willing non-black women would love to .... I need not continue with anything explicit ... for all sorts of vain reasons. If they do so with popular musicians, actors, and sports stars. A huge double standard remains with black men and white women (or women considered white for all practical purposes) that does not exist between white men and white women.

Sure, Seal has married Heidi Klum and has children by the German supermodel, and Tony Parker  has married Eva Longoria -- but those men aren't subject to electoral defeat.  

To which I say -- what do you know that I don't know?

... So far all I have is historical precedent. The last Presidents to fail to get re-elected are:

1. George Herbert Walker Bush. Nice foreign-policy achievements, but the economy faltered as his first and only term was approaching the end. The first President to succeed the man for whom he was VP by election since Martin Van Buren, he showed that the continuation of the same program of a successful President just isn't enough. Andrew Jackson was also a successful President.

Little relevance: Obama is very different from George W. Bush in that he is a sharp break from his predecessor.

2. Jimmy Carter. He barely defeated the incumbent with arguably the weakest credentials entering the Presidency and didn't grow on the job. The sputtering economy did not improve  (or at least didn't seem to -- it was not his fault that the job market was flooded with new young workers while he was President), and the nasty hostage situation in Iraq didn't take care of itself.

John Kerry might have fit that role had he won in 2004, and Obama is more like Ronald Reagan in his political skills than he is like Jimmy Carter.

3. Gerald Ford. President through the back door -- he replaced a disgraced Vice-President, only to succeed a disgraced President. Our war in Vietnam (even if we handed the war off to the South Vietnamese) ended in a way that few of us wanted it to end. Nixon-era financial legerdemain created stagflation whose worst effects occurred under Ford and Carter. Draw your own conclusions -- but Ford was the most unlikely of Presidents.

4. LBJ. Could have run for a full second term, but chose otherwise after a mess in Vietnam. Managing a war isn't so easy as it looks. It's a matter of taste whether to consider LBJ a success or a failure as President.

5. Harry Truman -- could have run for a third term, but didn't. Maybe he didn't want to, and maybe he saw that he couldn't defeat Eisenhower. Whatever. I don't see any Eisenhower in the immediate future of the GOP.

6. Herbert Hoover. Hardly any President ever entered his term with higher expectations. Those expectations betrayed him as did an economy whose collapse wasn't his fault. The economic collapse that Obama faces began before Obama became President.

7. William Howard Taft. He followed a very successful President (Teddy Roosevelt) and just didn't measure up. He was a judge by temperament, and not an administrator or a politician.    

Every President is different; every President faces different times. Your guess may be as good as mine.

[Devilman88]

In 2012 if nothing has changed(for the better) then it would have been a bad term for Obama.

[The Duke]

You're about to find out.

[Coburn In 2012]

A bad Obama term is what we are already having and it is only going to get worse.