Or he could just compromise and be a mediocre one-term president

Obama told Diane Sawyer, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president. ... You know, there’s a tendency in Washington to think that our job description of elected officials is to get re-elected. That’s not our job description.”

So if I’m understanding him, the way to get re-elected is to do a mediocre job, but doing a good job would make him so unpopular that he’d be defeated.