Questions

   Beware of absolutes and factoids supplied by partisans.
   To limit the factoid to one side enhances its truthiness at the expense of the other side.

   "Barack Obama became the fourth Democrat to win re-election in a hundred years," according to Brian Williams of NBC. (Did he say "only"?)
   Question: How many Republicans in the same time frame won their bids to stay in office? Answer: Four.
   Question: How many Democrats in the past hundred years lost a re-election bid? Answer: One (Jimmy Carter, 1980).
   Question: How many Republicans in the past hundred years lost bids to stay in office? Answer: Four (William Howard Taft, 1912, Herbert Hoover, 1932, Gerald Ford, 1976, and George H.W. Bush, 1992).
   Who were the others? Woodrow Wilson turned out Taft in 1912, and was re-elected in 1916. Franklin W. Roosevelt turned out Hoover in 1932 and was re-elected in 1936. Incumbent Gerald Ford lost in 1976, and incumbent George H.W. Bush lost in 1992.
   Republicans who were re-elected to a second term were Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1956, Richard Nixon in 1972, Ronald Reagan in 1984, and George W. Bush in 2004.
   Democrats who won their bids to stay in office were Woodrow Wilson in 1916, FDR in 1936, 1940 and 1944, Harry Truman in 1948, and Bill Clinton in 1996.
   Conclusion: Incumbents usually win.
   Question: Will Romney try again? Odds are against it. Only three major party candidates have made more than one attempt in more than a hundred years: Adlai Stevenson, Thomas E. Dewey and William Jennings Bryan.
   Source: The World Almanac and Book of Facts, 2011 print edition.
   Comment: Sometimes print is faster than the web.