Maybe President Polk had it right. Get in, get it done, then get the hell out of Dodge.
Going into office--literally going into office--he had his inaugural address labeled "palpable knavery and babbling folly" by the nation's leading newspaper; he faced the formidable Whigs; his own party had split into factions and was nursing hurt feelings over the nomination ruckus.
Nonetheless Polk, prone to self-righteousness and ferociously determined, blew by his opponents and accomplished every major objective he had outlined on Day One. He pledged and served a single term, in which he got his tariff reform, established an independent treasury, acquired the Oregon territory in prickly negotiations with Britain and stole the American Southwest from Mexico.
Then he left, leaving all the blowback to successors.
Just about now, President Obama is probably wondering why he didn't make a similar pledge: One term and I'm outta here, for second acts are too commonly those in which all the accumulated crap of the first hits the buzzsaws.
Either that or second-term presidents stumble or blunder exceedingly well on their own. In recent history we've the inept examples of Nixon, Reagan, Bush II (whose second-term blundering was more of an extension, really); and even the great multi-term FDR made a spectacular mess of things with his attempted Court-packing and ill-conceived budget-cutting.
This morning the NY Times cites Harry Truman--another second-term sufferer--as having observed that "the pressures and complexities of the presidency have grown to a state where they are almost too much for one man to endure." That was true then, and, as the Times notes, perhaps truer now, given "metadata technology"--as well, of course, as our inexhaustible media circus.
Yet outspoken presidential weariness reaches back to the earliest eras of our republic: Barack Obama isn't charged with penning his own letters in response to vast correspondence, or having to greet jobseekers and idle wanderers in the White House.
James K. Polk was physically spent upon leaving office. He died three months later.
But, leaving moral judgments aside--a Polk successor, Grant, regarded his predecessor's war as "one of the most unjust ever waged"--our 11th president did get the job done. In one term. Would he have faced second-term woes? Unquestionably, for they are as certain as first-term woes.
But are second rounds actually cursed? Only in that they possess an added kicker: inescapable accountability, from Day One.