Here is the Wikipedia account of what happened in 1968 when Lyndon B. Johnson "decided" not to run for re-election.
Entering the 1968 election campaign, initially, no prominent Democratic candidate was prepared to run against a sitting president of the Democratic party. Only Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota challenged Johnson as an anti-war candidate in the New Hampshire primary, hoping to pressure the Democrats to oppose the war. On March 12, McCarthy won 42% of the primary vote to Johnson's 49%, an amazingly strong showing for such a challenger. Four days later, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy of New York entered the race. Internal polling by Johnson's campaign in Wisconsin, the next state to hold a primary election, showed the President trailing badly. Johnson did not leave the White House to campaign.
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In addition, although it was not made public at the time, Johnson became worried about his failing health and was concerned that he might not make it through another four-year term. Therefore, at the end of a March 31 speech, he shocked the nation when he announced he would not run for re-election by concluding with the line: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President."
I think it's time for Democrats to start pressuring President Obama not to seek re-election in 2012 and allow for a Democrat that has a chance of winning to run.
(Full argument below the fold.)
Let me start by saying, I am a Democrat. I'm someone who volunteered for and donated more money than I could afford to, to the Obama 2008 campaign. I projected my hopes and dreams for how great this country could be onto Obama. I've learned my lesson now.
My doubts in Obama didn't start last week with the horrendous debt ceiling bill.
I first became worried even before he was sworn in, by the economic team he was putting together. Geithner, Summers, and other corporatists troubled me, but I told myself that he was bringing those that new best how the mess was caused, to help clean it up. Throw in a little "Team Of Rivals" spin in there, and I looked past it.
Then I wondered why Obama was pushing for such a small stimulus bill when so many economists were calling for a much larger stimulus. I knew that he didn't have 60 Democrats in the Senate at that time, but couldn't the President, with as bad as the economy was and as much political capital that he had, pretty much pressure those 2 or 3 Republican Senators that he ended up getting to vote for his proposal? Still, I trusted that he was a liberal and that he knew what he was doing.
Then he adopted a Republican health care plan which kept health care in the hands of private companies, did little to keep costs down, and mandates everyone to buy into a broken system. He never really pushed for a "public option" because he didn't want a public option. At this time he had 60 Democrats in the Senate. Do you really think that if he really wanted those Democrats who were balking at the public option, to support it, he couldn't of just came out, as the President, and said "We're trying to get everyone health care coverage, but my friend Joe Lieberman (or any other Dem who didn't want it at the time) is blocking us from moving forward on this great bill. But in retrospect, it's more likely that those few "moderate" Dems where actually providing cover for the President. Still, at the time, although increasingly dispirited I looked at the bright side that "historic" health care reform would help cover more Americans.
Then he continued the Bush Tax Cuts. Come on Barack, I said to myself. The Bush Tax Cuts? Really? Wasn't this one of your big campaign promises? You said you'd end the Bush Tax Cuts for those making over a quarter mil a year. But I told myself, he had to make a deal to get unemployment benefits extended.
Then came the budget negotiations earlier in the year where he negotiated more cuts than the Republicans were even initially asking for. But I said to myself, even though he was an amazingly horrible negotiator, he was dealing with a Republican controlled House of Representatives, and elections do have consequences, for Republicans at least.
Then this debt ceiling debacle came and went and I finally came to a different conclusion; Barack Obama is not a liberal. Arguably, he may not even be a Democrat.
So I started hearing more and more things that make more sense than my previous beliefs. I read a great op-ed in the NYT titled "What Happened to Obama?"
Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us he prefers a “balanced” approach to deficit reduction, one that weds “revenue enhancements” (a weak way of describing popular taxes on the rich and big corporations that are evading them) with “entitlement cuts” (an equally poor choice of words that implies that people who’ve worked their whole lives are looking for handouts). But the law he just signed includes only the cuts. This pattern of presenting inconsistent positions with no apparent recognition of their incoherence is another hallmark of this president’s storytelling. He announces in a speech on energy and climate change that we need to expand offshore oil drilling and coal production — two methods of obtaining fuels that contribute to the extreme weather Americans are now seeing. He supports a health care law that will use Medicaid to insure about 15 million more Americans and then endorses a budget plan that, through cuts to state budgets, will most likely decimate Medicaid and other essential programs for children, senior citizens and people who are vulnerable by virtue of disabilities or an economy that is getting weaker by the day. He gives a major speech on immigration reform after deporting around 800,000 immigrants in two years, a pace faster than nearly any other period in American history.
Then I read a piece by David Sirota titled The Bizarro FDR, and I start questioning further what President Obama is really about.
In forging such bipartisan complicity with what were once exclusively right-wing Republican objectives, Obama has achieved even more than what he fantasized about when he famously celebrated a previous Bizarro FDR. In a 2008 interview with a Nevada newspaper, Obama lauded Ronald Reagan for "chang(ing) the trajectory of America" and "put(ting) us on a fundamentally different path."
Reagan was a truly strong executive -- but the Gipper was nothing compared to our current president.
Then I watched this clip on The Young Turks that asks is President Obama a Trojan Horse?
No matter what the explanation for Obama is, it's become apparent to me that his policies and actions make him unable to win re-election.
Now there are many out there that make the argument that we'd be better off with a Republican President. That argument says that a Republican President wouldn't have been able to push through most of the things that Obama has gotten through so far. And even though I agree with that a Republican President couldn't of be so successful in passing Republican policies, I just don't think it's better to have a Republican President, I just think that it's better to have a real Democrat as President.
This is why Democrats need to start calling for Obama to voluntarily not seek re-election. I think it would be troublesome for Democrats to actually primary him next year, unless it was a very very strong progressive in the league of Russ Feingold or Bernie Sanders. Heck, as much as I opposed Hilary Clinton in the primaries in 2008, I now know that we could easily count on her to be more liberal and a better negotiator. But she couldn't primary Obama.
When a President has gotten to the point that one of his first supporters in congress, John Conyers, is calling for Democrats to march on Obama, (YouTube link, Conyers part starts at about the 2:20 mark in this video,) it's time to hang it up.
I still like President Obama as a person. It's nothing personal against him. It's just that we are going through an extraordinary time of turmoil in our history, and we need a real Democrat in office, not someone who just wants to play good cop bad cop on behalf of Republicans.