The proposal of a single six-year term for the President of the United States has been around for a long time. High-minded people have urged it from the beginning of the Republic. The Constitutional Convention turned it down in 1787, and recurrent efforts to put it in the Constitution have regularly failed in the two centuries since. Quite right: it is a terrible idea for a number of reasons among them that it is at war with the philosophy of democracy. The basic argument for the one-term, six-year presidency is that the quest for reelection is at the heart of our problems with self-government. The desire for reelection, it is claimed, drives Presidents to do things they would not otherwise do. It leads them to make easy promises and to postpone hard decisions. A single six-year term would liberate presidents from the pressures and temptations of politics. Instead of worrying about reelection, they would be free to do only what was best for the country. The argument is superficially attractive. But when you think about it, it is profoundly antidemocratic in its implications. It assumes Presidents know better than anyone else what is best for the country and that the people are so wrongheaded and ignorant that Presidents should be encouraged to disregard their wishes. It assumes that the less responsive a President is to popular desires and needs, the better President he or she will be. It assumes that the democratic process is the obstacle to wise decisions. The theory of American democracy is quite the opposite. It is that the give-and-take of the democratic process is the best source of wise decisions. It is that the President's duty is not to ignore and override popular concerns but to acknowledge and heed them. It is 'that the President's accountability to the popular will is the best guarantee that he or she will do a good job. The one-term limitation, as Gouverneur Morris, final draftsman of the Constitution, persuaded the convention, would 'destroy the great motive to good behavior,' which is the hope of reelection. A President, said Olive Ellsworth, another Founding Father, 'should be reelected if his conduct prove worthy of it. And he will be more likely to render himself worthy of it if he be rewardable with it.' The ban on reelection has other perverse consequences. Forbidding a President to run again, Gouverneur Morris said, is 'as much as to say that we should give him the benefit of experience, and then deprive ourselves of use of it.' George Washington stoutly opposed the idea. 'I can see no propriety,' he wrote, 'in precluding ourselves from the service of any man, who on some great emergency shall be deemed universally most capable of serving the public.' A single six-year term would release Presidents from the test of submitting their records to the voters. It would be an impeachment of the democratic process itself. The Founding Fathers were everlastingly right when they turned down this well-intentioned but ill-considered proposal 200 years ago. The main idea of the passage is that the United States Presidents should ______