Day: December 1, 2020

There’s also the question of how a president leads in a moment of crisis, which has been the downfall of many a one-term president. For example, to cite Hoover again, popular memory is especially unforgiving of his handling of the Great Depression. At the time, his name was attached to camps built by unemployed Americans as shelter when they lost their homes, and a “Hoover flag” referred to an empty pocket turned inside out. Of course, Hoover is an extreme example, but other one-term presidents have experienced a similar fate, earning reputations for being hapless and bumbling in the face of serious challenges. This has certainly been the case with Trump, who is thought to have mismanaged the pandemic and, by downplaying the severity of the disease, worsened the partisan divides on how to best combat it.

What’s hard, though, in analyzing one-term presidents is knowing just how much any of this is actually within their control. We know that presidents are not infinitely powerful, especially when it comes to engineering major legislation to address complicated economic problems. Take Carter. Economists at the time thought government spending needed to be curtailed to stop inflation, which meant making major cuts to government programs, but this was politically impossible for Carter, as Congress would have resisted and he would have lost support among New Deal Democrats, which were still an important part of the party’s coalition.