George H.W. Bush, Barack Obama, The Simpsons and the perils of being a “really good one-term president”

Homer gets into a fight with the former president.

Back in the early 1990s, when The Simpsons still seemed like a daring and cutting-edge show, one of its funnier episodes turned sitcom conventions on their head by introducing a wacky neighbor — former President George H.W. Bush. (This was also the episode that gave us Disco Stu, God bless him — a wonderful example of a one-off joke becoming a recurring character. ) One of the funnier — but also mean — moments came when the former president was depicted at a typewriter, reading aloud as he completed his memoir: “And because we’d accomplished everything we needed to in the first term, there was no need for a second. The end.” It was a hilarious spin on spin, the idea that a clear-cut election loss could be somehow spun as victory.

I couldn’t help but think of The Simpsons when I heard Barack Obama talk about his own future electoral prospects this morning:

President Obama, buffeted by criticism of his massive health care reform bill and election setbacks, said today he remained determined to tackle health care and other big problems despite the political dangers to his presidency.

“I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president,” he told ABC’s “World News” anchor Diane Sawyer in an exclusive interview today.

(Sigh.) The president is supposedly a smart man, deeply read, familiar with the history of his office. And I wonder: Who the heck would he point to as an example of a “really good one-term president”?

Maybe, I suppose, he’d look to Bush Peré himself. After all, the first President Bush did win a war against Iraq, presided over the final days of the Cold War without a disaster along the way and even created the foundation needed to balance the budget during the Clinton Era by violating his “no new taxes” pledge. He’s rather warmly remembered by the public at large, now, but at the time he was largely believed to be a failure: the Ross Perot revolution — a kind of Tea Party movement of its time — gained steam during the election, allowing Bill Clinton to become president.

Aside from the senior Bush, though, it’s hard to think of a one-term president in the last century, certainly, who is remembered fondly by history. Jimmy Carter? Uh, no. Herbert Hoover? Yikes. William Howard Taft? We remember that he was fat, and that’s about it.

It’s true that second terms of presidencies often falter a bit, thanks both to waning energy — running the country is hard — and to lame-duckiness. So what President Obama might want to consider is that the best way to be a mediocre two-term president is to be a pretty good first-term president. If he’s consigning himself to lame-duck status three years before the next election, the gig is already up.

‘Family Guy’ nominated for a Best Comedy Emmy

An honor that never went to The Simpsons. I believe South Park expressed my feelings about this: