Winning reelection this week, Obama again makes history
Already distinguished for being the first African American to be elected president, Barack Obama made presidential election history again this week by becoming the second president in history to be the third president in a row to win a second term. The only other time it happened in Americas 223 years of elections and 44 chief executives was with James Monroe in 1821.
This development is noteworthy as it is historical, because the last time involved three Founding Fathers: Thomas Jefferson, 1801-1809; James Madison, 1809-1817; and James Monroe, 1817-1825. As successive presidents elected to a second term, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama as Democrats bookended Republican George W. Bush on the presidential continuum.
And while Jefferson, Madison and Monroe were all Democratic-Republicans as president, Madison, like G. W. Bush, as the second of three, had political views diametrically opposed to those of Jefferson and Monroe, when, as a young man in 1788, he co-authored The Federalist Papers with Alexander Hamilton, Jeffersons political nemesis. But Madisons U turn in political thinking appears to have put him in lockstep with his fellow Virginians, Jefferson and Monroe, who together ruled from the White House successively, if not successfully, for 24 straight years.
In all, there were 17 in the office of POTUS who were elected to a second term, with most finishing it, except, notably, Lincoln (assassinated), McKinley (assassinated), and Nixon (resigned). While Franklin Roosevelt finished his second term, he then got reelected to an unprecedented third term, and then a fourth term, dying in office shortly after his final election. The four-term presidency was never replicated, thanks to the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution ratified in 1951, which prohibits anyone from being elected president more than twice, or being elected more than once, after completing two years or more of a predecessors presidency.
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