Photo by Library of Congress on Unsplash

Could Obama run for the US presidency for the third time?

Suraj Verma
3 min readJan 20, 2021

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Mr. Barack Obama is popularly known as the coolest president in the world. He was one of the most loved presidents who introduced major reforms to restructure world politics and bring smiles to people’s lives.

Not to forget that the first lady Ms. Michelle Obama’s constant support helped Mr. Obama be the person we know today.

His policies were based to combat climate change (COP-21 deal), handling US post-economic depression of 2008, foreign policies (regarding troops in Afghanistan), LGBTQ rights have been appreciated. Of course, he did have policies for which he was criticized like any other politician.

Mr. Obama became the 44th president of the US defeating Republican John McCain with his tenure spanning from 2009 to 2017. Obama’s average approval rating touched 50% during his tenure as a president.

Now the question arises that is it even possible for the coolest president to get re-elected as a president of the US?

Well, the answer is “NO”.

Franklin Roosevelt (Source: Fandom)

We’ll touch history now. It was the time of the 1930s when the world had been into the Great Depression. In 1932, the 37th US president was elected to be Franklin D. Roosevelt who was the governor of New York before running for elections. He was re-elected for the next 3 times in his office as the president of the US until WWII ended in the year 1945.

He served as the president of the US from 1932–44. He died just 11 weeks after he was into his fourth term. Vice president Harry S. Truman served as the president after Roosevelt.

The long tenure of Roosevelt in the office triggered the establishment of what we now know as the 22nd Amendment in the US constitution. The Amendment limited the total number of times a person could be re-elected as a president and serve in the office to two times. The Congress approved 22nd Amendment on 21 March 1947 with states ratifying by 1951.

US Congress (Source: Photo by Louis Velazquez on Unsplash)

Though Vice Presidents of the US can serve indefinitely as no amendment limits their tenure.

“There is a way to bypass the 22nd Amendment”.

Consider a case where the two-time President chooses to serve as Vice-President (which has never happened in the history of US politics). Now if the current president resigns or is impeached or dies in office then in that case the Vice President would become the President of the US. In that way, a person could serve as the President of the US for more than 8 years.

Hope you loved the article :).

I would like to thank my readers for dropping here. I hope the time you spent reading my article has been fruitful.😊

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Suraj Verma

Developer & Programmer (who loves writing about social sciences & world politics)