In 2010, President Obama told Diane Sawyer that he would "rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president." Now, of course, he's doing everything he can to make sure that he gets a second term. No president wants the humiliation of getting tossed out of office.
More than that, in terms of his legacy, Mr. Obama is right to look for vindication from the people instead of from history's judgment, as measured in those periodic polls in which historians rate presidential performance. The professional history-makers, it turns out, generally follow the sentiments of the electorate, at least once the smoke of the recent past has cleared.
Consider Dwight Eisenhower, initially pegged by historians as a mediocre two-termer. In 1962, a year after Ike relinquished the presidency, a poll by Harvard's Arthur Schlesinger Sr. ranked him 22nd—between Chester A. Arthur, largely a presidential nonentity, and Andrew Johnson, impeached by the House and nearly convicted by the Senate. Republicans were outraged; Democrats laughed. By the time a 1981 poll was taken, however, Eisenhower had moved up to 12th. The following year he was ninth. In three subsequent polls he came in 11th, 10th and eighth.
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