Newsweek: Obama In Top 10 of Presidents Since Teddy Roosevelt

Despite having failed to stop let alone reverse the rising of the seas, Barack Obama has made Newsweek’s newest ten best presidents list, which gives readers a top ten of the chief executives since 1900. Newsweek, whose list unsurprisingly is dominated by liberal Democrats, gave this justification for selecting Obama in a caption in a photo slide:

"Picking a sitting president in a tally of the best is tricky – history hasn’t had time to put things in a more sober context. But the historic election of America’s first black president cannot be ignored. That a man whose ancestors included a slave could become the leader of a nation founded to some extent in slavery is as much an achievement for the country as it is a marker for Obama himself. Whether Obama stays or goes, his standing, as a fundamentally groundbreaking president will remain."

So, Obama deserves to be on the list simply because he’s black?! Has affirmative action percolated into historical analysis? After all, such an honorable mention needs “a more sober context” with the passage of time to make an accurate and honest assessment. Historians often talk about “what could have been” if a former head of state had lived. You see this a lot with JFK, who is also on the list, and his 1000 daylong administration.

Of course, JFK steered the world away from nuclear disaster in October of 1962, proposed an across the board tax cut, and pushed our scientific community to engineer a mission to the moon. By contrast, Barack Obama’s increased the national debt by $5 trillion, kept unemployment above 8 percent for over 40 consecutive months, and presided over the demise of the U.S. space shuttle program.

Newsweek staffers are making the rounds to promote the list. Contributing editor Sir Harold Evans — he’s also the husband for Newsweek’s editor Tina Brown – appeared on yesterday’s Jansing & Co. program on MSNBC, where he said that the historians who formulated the list were looking for “active and effective” presidents who “enhanced” the ideal of what it is to be American.

Not surprisingly, government-increasing liberal Democrats like FDR and LBJ, as well as slightly more moderate big government Democrats like Truman and Clinton dominate the list.

Asked about why the list is predominantly Democratic in nature, Evans insisted that the Republicans in the 20th century were by and large uninspiring if not corrupt. In the process, he trashed free-market conservative Calvin Coolidge — who presided over an economic boom, low unemployment, and the reduction of the national debt — as unimaginative.

If by lacking imagination, Evans means a mind that dreamed up new bureaucracies and larger federal government, he’s correct. But the results speak for themselves, even if they don’t excite historians.

I've just spent about three hours listening to a very in depth educational about money ... ours and Europes going back more than a couple of hundred years ago.

The focus was (is) on the Fed.

The base of the fed is the ability to just say into existence .. money, or rathger debt certificates.

I throw this into your thread because, THAT'S what all this polling business is.

Invented 'data' for the purpose of attempting to sway the electorate.

I really need a good night's sleep because

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7auQEXTWomA

and

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936

Has my head SO full of ... I don't know ... America has been under attack for so long ...

I need sleep.

And They're Just Makin' Up All This Poll Crap.

44-26=18

18 presidents since teddy

Lets make a real top ten list. This means we must leave out 8 from the list.

First to be left out is jimmy carter and obama, for obvious reasons.

now, stands to reason we should leave out anyone who quits or gets impeached or declines to run for re election

that knocks out nixon, clinton, and LBJ

We are up to 5. We must pick 3 more to eliminate. A simple method would be to make a list of all the “one termers” and go from there.

one termers since teddy:

Taft
Harding
Hoover
Ford

I will give Ford a pardon(haha) and kick the first 3 to the curb.

That leaves on the list these 10

Teddy
Wilson
Coolidge
FDR
Truman
Ike
Kenedy
Ford
Reagan
Bush
Bush jr

oops, that’s one too many. Kick Ford to the curb(sorry bud, you don’t get a pardon after all)

Now for ranking

Reagan
Coolidge
Teddy
and the rest I don’t really care to try to rank except for last place...

Wilson

Under what criteria did LBJ reach 3rd? So disastrous he refused to run for a 2nd full term and the country changed parties!

Wilson's handling of the end of WW1 was so inept he set the stage for WW2 and the country changed parties for his successor!

JFK wasn't around long enough to accomplish much but his election showed Ike couldn't have been that successful and beloved because the country changed parties.

Clinton? Al Gore was rejected, if narrowly. His policies were so rejected creating the first Republican Congress in 40 years.

No way should Reagan be so low on this list. He was just so awful, his Vice President succeeded him easily.

The Left will always self-pleasure over FDR as TIME did in making him "Person of the Century" while ignoring his treatment of Jewish refugees, his abuse of the U.S. Supreme Court, his power lust putting him into a fourth term, his lack of regard for his health and ability to function in the office, his racism, his allowing Pearl Harbor, his policies extending the Great Depression and his embrace of the evil that was Joe Stalin.

Newsweek has been around for awhile. Long enough, in fact, to have promoted "global cooling and the coming ice age".

The Cooling World
Newsweek, April 28, 1975

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.

The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.

To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”

A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.

To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.

Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”

Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.

“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.

Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

—PETER GWYNNE with bureau reports

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