I refer, of course, to the visionary gentlemen who shaped the postwar governance of the United States of America, and their insistence on limited terms in the highest political office in the land. I write today in the shadow of Clinton’s reign of terror, but safe in the knowledge that he must then join me on the lecture tour: I guess in the distant future we will look back on him with some sort of benevolent fondness.2 Term limits can be critical in determining success. Staying with politics, the 1980s saw the US and UK led by two people of very similar ideologies Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher Few would deny that the latter’s intellectual capacity for the job qualified her to leave a more successful scorch mark on the fabric of history than the error prone B-movie star but he did his allotted time, rode off into the sunset and many were sad to see him go. Here we have a guy who, armed only with a Norman Rockwell-meets-Bugs-Bunny communication style, and an Adam-Smithmeets
Madge-in-a-trailer-park economic doctrine, has left us with a memory of what many term a Golden period.
What of Thatcher? Here’s a thought, if she, too, had been limited to her first 8 years, she would have gone down in history as one of Britain’s finest Prime Ministers and would have my vote for the top spot. She gave a quite astonishing performance of true leadership, but neither the system nor her own nature provided a mandatory or obvious successor; and she stayed on. And on and on and on. Eventually she became isolated in her own party, out of touch with the nation, and a sad parody of herself. She began giving off what many of us believe were the first symptoms of mad cow disease. If Reagan had stayed? Does anyone doubt that the thing would have ended unhappily and the US nation would have had to use a tire-lever to get him out?
