At the risk of getting ahead of ourselves: Barack Obama would make a pretty damn good ex-president.
We're not saying he should become an ex-president after just four years in office—only that this line of thinking isn't premature. With the economy uncertain and ever more Americans occupying Main Street, the latest polls show Obama has about a coin flip's chance of winning another term in office—or of being plunged, just 13 months from now, into the most exclusive retirement club on earth.
So it's worth considering: what would his next act look like? If defeated, Obama would become, at 51, the youngest former president in more than a century. (Only Teddy Roosevelt was younger: he was 50 when he left office in 1909.) With strong health and an agile mind--and no shortage of ways to make staggering sums of money--Obama would have the time and skills to mount one of the most impressive ex-presidencies on record. And if history is a guide, the worse Obama fares as commander in chief, the better he might shine as ex-commander in chief. "It may sound whimsical, but it's true," says historian Richard Norton Smith. An administration that ends badly creates an equal and opposite zeal for rehabilitating a legacy, says Smith.
Example A is Jimmy Carter. Fired after four years of stagflation and malaise, the former peanut farmer reinvented the office of the ex-presidency, thrusting himself into world diplomacy, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Richard Nixon is well regarded by historians for his voluminous output of foreign-policy books while in exile. And the consensus best ex-president of the last 100 years is Herbert Hoover. The man who ushered in the Great Depression later became an honored statesman and helped Europe not starve after World War II. "There are striking parallels between one-term presidents, highly unpopular, who went on to achieve not a conventional political luster but a public respect bordering on veneration for the nonpolitical work that they undertook," Smith says.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/11/barack-obama-s-next-job.html
:lol:
As one of the worst presidents we have every seen, Obama would make a great ex-president in 2012.
We're not saying he should become an ex-president after just four years in office—only that this line of thinking isn't premature. With the economy uncertain and ever more Americans occupying Main Street, the latest polls show Obama has about a coin flip's chance of winning another term in office—or of being plunged, just 13 months from now, into the most exclusive retirement club on earth.
So it's worth considering: what would his next act look like? If defeated, Obama would become, at 51, the youngest former president in more than a century. (Only Teddy Roosevelt was younger: he was 50 when he left office in 1909.) With strong health and an agile mind--and no shortage of ways to make staggering sums of money--Obama would have the time and skills to mount one of the most impressive ex-presidencies on record. And if history is a guide, the worse Obama fares as commander in chief, the better he might shine as ex-commander in chief. "It may sound whimsical, but it's true," says historian Richard Norton Smith. An administration that ends badly creates an equal and opposite zeal for rehabilitating a legacy, says Smith.
Example A is Jimmy Carter. Fired after four years of stagflation and malaise, the former peanut farmer reinvented the office of the ex-presidency, thrusting himself into world diplomacy, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Richard Nixon is well regarded by historians for his voluminous output of foreign-policy books while in exile. And the consensus best ex-president of the last 100 years is Herbert Hoover. The man who ushered in the Great Depression later became an honored statesman and helped Europe not starve after World War II. "There are striking parallels between one-term presidents, highly unpopular, who went on to achieve not a conventional political luster but a public respect bordering on veneration for the nonpolitical work that they undertook," Smith says.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/11/barack-obama-s-next-job.html
:lol:
As one of the worst presidents we have every seen, Obama would make a great ex-president in 2012.