The Curse of the Second

By GAIL COLLINS, NYT

Maybe there’s no such thing as a happy second-term presidency.

Let’s talk this through. Discussing presidential history is much more fun than discussing HealthCare.gov. Also, I always enjoy having a chance to mention Grover Cleveland.

“He was very unhappy,” said Henry Graff, Cleveland’s biographer. “First, he got cancer of the mouth.” That was at the beginning of Cleveland’s second term. Because the nation was in an economic crisis, the president kept his condition secret and had surgery on a yacht that was bobbing off Long Island. Then it was time for the Depression of 1893.

See? We’re already feeling that things could be worse.

Lately, it really has seemed as if the Obama White House is incapable of producing good news beyond the fact that the debt ceiling wasn’t smashed. Swooning websites, security snoops run amok — there’d be some comfort in believing that it’s all historically inevitable. “In almost every case, you can argue that the second terms have been pretty dreadful,” said Michael Beschloss, the presidential historian.

(More here.)