President Barack Obama made a rather remarkable claim the day after Christmas — indicating his infamous ego has been bruised but is generally still in its typically overworked condition.

Obama said he could have beaten Republican President-Elect Donald Trump in the election on Nov. 8.

“I doubt given these historical forces at work that Obama could have overcome them to defeat Trump,” said Craig Shirley.

“I’m confident that if I — if I had run again and articulated [the message], I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama told his former campaign manager, David Axelrod, on Axelrod’s podcast. “I know that in conversations that I’ve had with people around the country, even some people who disagreed with me, they would say, ‘The vision, the direction that you point towards is the right one.'”

It’s a dubious claim.

Forget that Obama’s argument itself is mostly wishful bluster and babble. And also forget that the Constitution doesn’t allow a U.S. president to seek a third four-year term.

And also, for now, put aside the damage that the Affordable Care Act did to Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.

And lastly, forget the most inconvenient fact: According to presidential historian Craig Shirley, Obama is the first re-elected president since Democrat Woodrow Wilson to “go backwards” in his successful second campaign. Like Wilson, Obama was re-elected in 2012 with fewer electoral votes than when first elected.

Obama was also re-elected with fewer popular votes than when first elected in 2008, losing more than 3 million voters in his 2012 totals.

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Thus, Obama’s remark is a bit naive because the task of winning a third term is a tall order in any Western democracy. Such a feat has not been done very often in recent history.

In Canada just last year, where elections are not held on a regular schedule, Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper was shown the door by voters after more than nine years in office.

Of course, Harper might have helped the Conservative Party by letting someone else run.

That tactic was tried successfully in 1990, after the United Kingdom’s leader, Margaret Thatcher, was forced out of leadership by her Conservative Party. John Major took over and was able to defend the Conservative Party majority in the 1992 elections.

Thatcher is rightly considered one of the greatest conservative leaders of the West, post-World War II. But even Thatcher lost support within her own party after polls made clear the Conservatives might lose the next election. She resigned as leader in November 1990, more than 11 years after taking the reins in 1979.

In the United States, the American voter is even more distrustful of handing a third or fourth term to the same person, or to the same political party.

It took the Great Depression and a war in Europe to convince voters to re-elect Democratic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to a third term in 1940. According to Sean Trende of RealClearPolitics, the great FDR trailed the Republican candidates in the polls until Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939. A year later, FDR easily beat Republican Wendell Willkie.

When that war dragged the United States in, FDR won another term in 1944. FDR died in 1945, and voters gave President Harry Truman, a Democrat, a surprise win in 1948.

But FDR’s wins came at a cost. Americans thought twice about giving another president more than two terms — so they created term limits via constitutional amendment in 1951.

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Since then, only one party, the Republican Party, has won three consecutive terms in the White House. The third term happened after what was then the longest peacetime expansion since World War II, in 1988. It also happened with a new candidate, George H. W. Bush.

Yet it was widely speculated at the time that President Ronald Reagan could have done the job himself, and won a third term had the Constitution allowed it.

The question today is: Is Obama another FDR or Reagan? Losing as many electoral and popular votes as he did in 2012 indicates he is not.

And look how his successor in the Democratic Party performed in the election. Clinton was weighed down by the problems of Obama’s record: ISIS terrorism, the ballooning costs of Obamacare, the drab seven-year recovery. The shine after eight years in office came off Obama. Once viewed as a powerful agent of change, he was now seen as someone who failed to cut deals with Congress.

“Obama’s election [in 2008] was a once-in-a-lifetime event and the perfect alignment of the planets was necessary,” said Shirley. “But Obama has been kryptonite to his own party. The Democrats have lost everything, from the White House to the statehouse to the dog house.”

Obama has also underestimated the forces at work in 2016. It’s why Trump, the Republican, won 200 counties that Democrat Obama won twice.

“Trump represents two historical sequences of events,” said Shirley. “The first is this country has been moving rightward — in fits and starts — since the New Deal. The second is every generation or so, America goes through populist eruption, whose centrality is reform — Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, FDR, Reagan, and now Trump. I doubt, given these historical forces at work, that Obama could have overcome them to defeat Trump.”