Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers is not a fan of what is preventing Barack Obama from being re-reelected, using rather odd reasoning:

Disillusionment with Washington has rarely run higher. Congress is unable to act even in areas where there is widespread agreement that measures are necessary, such as immigration, infrastructure spending and business tax reform. The Obama administration, rightly or wrongly, is increasingly condemned as ineffectual. What was once a flood of extraordinarily talented people eager to go into government has shrunk to a trickle, and many crucial positions remain unfilled for months or even years. Bipartisan compromise seems inconceivable on profoundly important long-term challenges such as climate change, national security strategy and the need to strengthen entitlement programs in a fiscally responsible way. …

George W. Bush’s second term began with a futile effort to reform Social Security and was then defined by the debacle of Hurricane Katrina and the nation’s plunge into financial crisis. His most significant policy steps — large structural tax cuts, redefinition of the federal role in education, the introduction of prescription drug benefits to Medicare and reorientation of national security strategy toward the threat of terrorism — all took place during his first term.

Bill Clinton’s second term will be remembered for scandal and his impeachment by the House. His most important legislative accomplishments — such as major moves to balance the budget, reforming welfare to support work rather than dependency, expansion of health-insurance benefits — took place in his first term.

Ronald Reagan’s second term was marked by the Iran-Contra scandal and a sense of a president who had become remote from much of the work of his administration. While the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was important, his most significant legacies — big tax and spending cuts, deregulation and a major defense buildup — largely occurred during his first term.

Richard Nixon’s second term was not completed because of his resignation over Watergate. The most important policy measures of his administration — the opening to China, withdrawal from Vietnam, the establishment of a major federal role in environmental and other forms of regulation — took place in his first term.

Dwight Eisenhower’s second term involved the resignation of his chief of staff and, more important, a growing perception that the country was suffering from a stifling complacency. It is hard to point to anything to compare to first-term accomplishments such as the withdrawal from Korea and initiation of the interstate highway system.

Harry Truman’s second term was marked by the Korean War, scandal, gridlock and extraordinarily low public approval. His important legacies — the Marshall Plan, the containment strategy, the postwar focus on strengthening the economy with measures such as the G.I. Bill and federal housing support — were products of his first term.

Franklin Roosevelt’s second term was the least successful part of his presidency, as it saw the failure of his effort to pack the Supreme Court and a major economic relapse in 1938 and no accomplishment remotely comparable to the New Deal or his wartime leadership.

And second terms have what may well be a substantial added cost. A large part of what presidents do during their first terms, particularly in the latter half, is directed at securing reelection rather than any longer-term objective.

Would the U.S. government function better if presidents were limited to one term, perhaps of six years? The unfortunate, bipartisan experience with second terms suggests the issue is worthy of debate. The historical record helps makes the case for change.

Why the record is not dispositive, however, is suggested by the term “lame duck.” As the phrase suggests, leaders nearing the end of their time in office lose the ability to influence other actors by offering future rewards and punishments or by making deals in which they commit to future actions. If this is the main reason second terms are difficult, then removing the possibility of reelection could simply pull the problems forward into first terms.

This is why many scholars regard the current constitutional limit of two presidential terms as problematic. However, reviewing the fairly dismal experience of second terms, my guess is that problems caused by lame-duck effects are much smaller than those caused by a toxic combination of hubris and exhaustion after the extraordinary effort that a president and his team must exert to achieve reelection. But the issue requires much more study and debate.

The belief that this time will be different usually precedes trouble, and so it has been with second terms. On the night of their reelection, all reelected presidents expect to beat the second-term curse. At least since the Civil War, none has. And we have been governed by reelected presidents for close about 40 percent of the last century. National reflection on reform is overdue.

To which, replies Michael Barone:

Summers is persuasive in arguing that most presidents in the last three-quarters of a century have made their major marks in their first terms. But second terms are not always disastrous. Ronald Reagan pushed through bipartisan tax reform, an arms control agreement with the Soviets and a weakening of the Soviet empire that resulted in its collapse shortly after he left office. And his vice president, George H.W. Bush, was elected to succeed him by a 7 percent margin, one not exceeded by any presidential candidate since. Bill Clinton — and it was in his second term that Summers served as Treasury secretary — negotiated Medicare and fiscal policies that resulted in a balanced federal budget. His vice president, Al Gore, received a plurality of popular votes in the next election, although not enough electoral votes to win. …

Summers gingerly avoids endorsing oft-made proposals for a single six-year presidential term. “My guess,” he writes, “is that problems caused by lame-duck effects are much smaller than those caused by a toxic combination of hubris and exhaustion after the extraordinary effort that a president and his team must exert to achieve reelection.” Over at vox.com, Matt Yglesias gingerly suggests repealing the 22nd Amendment, which limits presidents to two terms. “It could be that by rendering second-term presidents ineligible for future terms in office, the 22nd Amendment is slightly undermining the quality of governance by eliminating the basic mechanism of electoral accountability.”

Here I part company. I think the United States is very much a 22nd Amendment nation, a nation that is still inspired by George Washington’s example of serving two and only two terms as president and then retiring to private life. This precedent has been broken only once, and in extraordinary circumstances, when Franklin Roosevelt was elected to a third term in 1940 and a fourth term in 1944. But that was a time of extreme peril and world war. …

Congress and the state legislatures passed the 22nd Amendment to prevent any future president from following Roosevelt’s example, but the next two two-term presidents, Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, like George W. Bush more recently, plainly had no appetite for a third term. Margaret Thatcher served 11 and a half years as prime minister of the United Kingdom, and Tony Blair served 10 years — both longer than two-term presidents. But I think it’s widely agreed that these two leaders of extraordinary ability stayed at least just a bit too long.

Bill Clinton, perhaps, did want a third term and is said to have told friends that he could have won again in 2000 absent the 22nd Amendment. I think he was fooling himself. I think the two-term 22nd Amendment bias of the American people, which had worked to save him from removal after he was impeached (people thought he had been elected to two terms and should be allowed to serve them out), would have worked against him if he had been eligible to seek and had sought a third term.

As for Barack Obama, does anyone now think he is lusting after a third term?

Actually, Obama’s megalomania probably is lusting after a third term. Thinking Americans can excuse people’s voting for Obama the first time, but not the second.

Meanwhile, James Taranto wonders if there really is a second-term curse:

As it happens, we encountered the same idea a few weeks ago, and it was suggested by someone whose politics are more or less the opposite of Summers’s: James Buckley, the conservative former U.S. senator from New York, whom we interviewed for The Wall Street Journal.

Buckley’s argument focused on first terms rather than second ones: “My eye-opener was when I first stepped into the Oval Office. I’d just been elected [in 1970], and Nixon invited me to come to Washington to say hello.” President Nixon was there, along with George Shultz, director of the Office of Management and Budget, and H.R. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff.

The president and his men were discussing economic policy. “I heard Nixon say: ‘But Milton Friedman doesn’t realize there’s an election coming up.’ He was talking about two years away. The inference I drew was that Friedman had made a recommendation that everyone agreed was the right thing to do, but it was politically not acceptable. And it occurred to me that if you had a single six-year presidential term, he could accomplish everything he set out to accomplish without having to compromise for these fringe groups that would give you 2% here or 3% there, and presumably couldn’t do critical damage because he had Congress to hold him at bay.” …

This column is skeptical of both ideas, though Yglesias’s is the easier to rebut. For one thing, the putative curse predates the 22nd Amendment. Summers’s list of presidents with bad second terms includes FDR and Truman, neither of whom was subject to its restrictions. (The amendment provides that “this article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this article was proposed by the Congress”–i.e., to Truman, who was president in 1947.) Summers argues that the curse has operated “at least since the Civil War,” which would mean it applied to Presidents Grant and Wilson, and possibly Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt, as well.

While the 22nd Amendment was legally novel, one can also see it as a return to traditional practice. FDR was the only president ever nominated by a major party for a third term. George Washington was celebrated for leaving office after two terms and resisting the temptation to set himself up as president-for-life. FDR actually was president-for-life–one of only four presidents to die in office of natural causes. (The other three were all single-termers.)

If tradition constrains future presidents from seeking third terms, then the effect on “electoral accountability” of repealing the 22nd Amendment would be nil. If it doesn’t, then we would be back to the danger of having a president-for-life. It isn’t hard to imagine a president who is good at winning elections but lousy at governing. Some would say that description fits the current incumbent.

At the same time, the dichotomy between doing the right thing and doing the politically expedient thing is to some extent a false one. Sometimes politicians and government administrators are wiser than the public, sometimes not. That is a basic conundrum of democratic governance, and an irresolvable one. A single six-year presidential term might yield better results than the status quo, but there’s no assurance it wouldn’t make things worse.

And is the “second-term curse” a real problem? The case for the affirmative seems reasonably strong when you look at it the way Summers does, by comparing each president’s first term with his second. But the contrast is much stronger in some cases than in others. No one denies Nixon’s presidency ended in abject failure, but neither does anyone claim that Reagan’s or Clinton’s did.

To some extent the drop-off in performance is simply a regression to the mean. If one could quantify presidential success, one would expect a high score in the first term to be followed by a lower one (though not necessarily a low one) in the second term, simply because there is limited room for improvement.

The same would apply in reverse: A president with a disastrous first term–a Hoover or a Carter–would be likely to improve in a second term. But the Hoovers and the Carters usually don’t get second terms. (To our mind, “six years of Jimmy Carter” is the most emotionally powerful rejoinder to the Summers-Buckley term-limit idea.)

But what happens when you compare different terms across presidencies? It seems to us that Reagan’s and Clinton’s second terms were both more successful than Obama’s first term. No doubt that evaluation is skewed by our own antipathy to Obama’s ideology; we do not, for example, reckon the passage of the Affordable Care Act a success, whereas his supporters do. But if the measure of presidential success is the enactment of consequential legislation, consider that Reagan’s second term produced the Tax Reform Act and the Immigration Reform and Control Act, both passed in 1986.

And there were times during Obama’s first term in which even many of his strongest supporters despaired of his performance in office. Remember August 2011 and the left’s summer of discontent?

What did Obama do after that summer that caused his supporters to see his first term as a success after all? Primarily, he got re-elected. Therein lies the central flaw in the theory of the second-term curse: To the extent that re-election itself is a measure of presidential success, the first term of a two-term presidency is successful by definition.

The concept of term limits is immensely popular because of what it really means — getting rid of career politicians you don’t like but have no control over because you don’t live in their district. Most readers of this blog probably would be perfectly happy jettisoning Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, or, in this state, Sen. Fred Risser (D–Madison), who first got elected to the Senate when I was 1 year old.

The flip side, of course, involves getting rid of politicians you do like. The political careers of U.S. Rep. Tom Petri (R–Fond du Lac) and state Sens. Mike Ellis (R–Neenah) and Dale Schultz (R–Richland Center) are ending this year without term limits. Petri is retiring apparently because of a primary challenge, Ellis made colorful public statements one too many times, and Schultz didn’t feel like taking on a primary challenge.

In all three cases, I would have predicted they would have been reelected in November. None of the three faced difficult races once they got elected, and perhaps that’s because their constituents thought they were doing a good job. Perhaps Pelosi’s constituents feel the same way.

It is certainly true that the Founding Fathers did not intend for someone like Reid to have served as long as he has. (He was first elected to the Senate in 1986 after four years in the House of Representatives.) The George Washington standard didn’t require term limits. Before the 22nd Amendment became law, only two presidents — Ulysses S. Grant and Franklin Roosevelt — ran for reelection more than once. Grant didn’t get nominated by the Republicans in 1880, and you know what FDR did. (Historians’ opinion of FDR probably would have been most different had he been forced to leave office after the 1940 election. And, of course, one wonders who would have succeeded him in office.) Actually, there should be a fourth on that list, Grover Cleveland, except that he won, lost and won.

Term limits are, we must admit, fundamentally anti-democratic because they take away a voter’s choice. A lot of Democrats would have supported a third Bill Clinton term in 2000, including, of course, Slick Willie himself. A lot of Republicans would have supported a third Ronald Reagan term in 1988, even if Reagan thought otherwise.

The issue that hampers Congressional term limits is the indisputable fact that there aren’t very many competitive House races. Does anyone seriously believe a term-limited Pelosi would be replaced by a Republican? Or, for that matter, Mark Pocan or Gwen Moore? There is no term limit that would pass constitutional muster that would eliminate the incumbent party from fielding a candidate in a particular election.

It is true that there is more turnover in states with term limits. The unintended consequence is that legislative staffers and lobbyists become more powerful, and that’s changing one bad thing (fossils in office) with two others.

Truth be told, for a term limit to have any teeth, it has to prohibit reelection, period. Our politics would certainly be different if politicians could serve only one term in office. That would create instant lame ducks, but you’d have an entire legislature or Congress full of them.