4 February—The really big news today is that yesterday President Joe Biden handily won the Democratic party primary in South Carolina with 96.2 percent of the vote. Really big? Does anybody really care? Was there ever any doubt? The somewhat less big news out of South Carolina is that flake candidate Marianne Williamson outpolled Dear Abby nephew Dean Phillips by 2.1 percent to 1.7 percent in the same gratuitous primary. One would have expected . . . maybe not.

It must be noted that incumbent presidents have never been defeated by primary challengers in the five decades the modern party primary system has been in effect. It must also be noted, however, that presidents who have been able to weather noteworthy primary challenges have nevertheless gone on to be ignominiously defeated in the general elections: Jerry Ford very nearly lost the nomination to Ronald Reagan in 1976 and went on to lose the general to Jimmy Carter; Jimmy Carter overcame a strong primary challenge from Teddy Kennedy and lost the general to Reagan in 1980 (poetic justice, perhaps); and while Pat Buchanan never won a primary against George H.W. Bush in 1992, he seriously divided Republicans, thus allowing Willy Clinton to steal the presidency.

Before the modern primary system seriously screwed up American politics, incumbent presidents Harry Truman in 1952 and Lyndon Johnson in 1968 decided not to run for third terms after uncomfortable challenges from within their own fractured Democratic party.

Truman, you’ll recall, had been vice president under FDR and Johnson under JFK, so both moved into the Oval Office upon the death of a popular predecessor. Amendment XXII limited presidential election eligibility to two times and stipulated that acting as president “for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected” was essentially equivalent to having been elected to that term. That would have disqualified Truman from a third term, since he served almost all of FDR’s last four-year term.

To allow Truman to serve a third term, should he have desired, then, the amendment specified, “But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress.” Amendment XXII was approved by Congress in 1947 and ratified in 1951. So it could apply only to Harry Truman.

Since Republicans had majorities in both houses of Congress in 1947, you wonder why they greased the skids for a Democrat. Well, for one thing, both major parties and American politics in general were far more civil back then . . .