Posted on 02/19/2018 6:50:50 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Political polarization may be blotting out Americans' understanding of their own history, a new poll suggests. More Americans identified former Presidents Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama as the best president in U.S. history rather than Abraham Lincoln and George Washington.
When asked who was the best president in U.S. history, 16 percent of Americans selected Reagan and another 16 percent selected Obama, according to a recent YouGov survey. Lincoln took third place with 15 percent, and Washington followed with 10 percent.
The grand totals miss the larger story, however. Among Republicans, 36 percent chose Reagan, while only two percent of Democrats agreed. Obama enjoyed a similar disparity — 33 percent of Democrats said he was the best president, while only two percent of Republicans agreed.
Lincoln received even support from both parties, at 15 percent. Tragically, only 14 percent of Republicans chose Washington, and only six percent of Democrats did likewise.
While a strong case could be made for Reagan, Lincoln and Washington should beat him and Obama easily on the merits. Ronald Reagan led the final drive to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and Obama did represent a symbolic victory as the first black president (even though he followed the same destructive Progressivism of some of America's worst presidents).
Even so, Abraham Lincoln held the Union together, defeating the Confederacy and fighting in order to save the Constitution, which included no secession clause. Lincoln's stance against slavery mattered less to him than preserving the Union, but he eventually led the effort to pass the 13th Amendment, eradicating the scourge of slavery once and for all.
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address has gone down in the hearts and minds of Americans for generations, but his second inaugural address is arguably the best speech he ever gave. This speech gave a religious interpretation of the Civil War unmatched in its humility and interpretation of American history.
"Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has his own purposes," Lincoln declared.
He rooted the need for the war in Matthew 18:7:
Woe unto the world because of offences! for it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh!' If we shall suppose that American Slavery is one of those offences which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South, this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offence came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a Living God always ascribe to Him?
When it comes to character, I’ll take Harding over Obama, Kennedy, Clinton, and a few others.
You are all using the wrong numbers for worst three, as Grover Cleveland had two non-consecutive terms. There have only been 44 presidents up to and including Trump. Cleveland was both POTUS 22 and POTUS 24. Now that’s got to count for something.
You can say who should top the list and a few near the bottom, very difficult to compare presidents in the middle of the pack who served in such different historical circumstances. Martin van Buren might have been like a Bill Clinton without interns, for all we know.
Robert Taft was the best President we never had. He would have made for a great President, IMHO, and it’s a shame the GOP never let him get the nomination.
To put any modern president over Washington shows you what a joke this sort of thing is
Who cares?
Why do you post this crap?
IDGAS!!
We have real pressing and serious problems to deal with.
And you want to play with idiot lists that don't matter at all!
Shall we get serious instead?
Kennedy was a terrible president and a very weak man. He plotted the assassination of three world leaders at the same time: Diem, Castro, and Trujillo and missed the one who was a real problem.
While JFK was dealing with his October late nights of the Cuban Missile Crises his teenage intern mistress, Mimi Beardsley, was not only at his beck and call but was upstairs in the family quarters. Another mistress, Judith Campbell, was also the mistress of a top mob boss. Another mistress, Mary Pinchot Meyer, was an early LSD pioneer. Another mistress was a mentally unstable basket case that he treated like “a piece of meat” to be passed around: Marilyn Monroe.
JFK appointed his brother as Attorney General and wire tapped more than Nixon could even imagine.
JFK vastly increased troop numbers in Vietnam, tied our flag to the pole there with the Diem assassination, and pushed the thinking of managed wars with his Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara.
It is no wonder that two months before Dallas, Jackie was cooling her heels with Aristotle Onassis instead of mourning the loss of her baby with her own husband.
Washington ‘invented’ the office. Kinda hard not to put him at #1.
Well, Obama did win a Nobel. And he managed with just a pen and a phone. What could be better than that? //obvious sarc
Kennedy would have made my list. He gets an incomplete score. I generally mark him down for his mishandling of the Bay of Pigs. And while his restraint during the Cuban Missile Crisis was just what was needed, his failure at the BoP basically encouraged the Russians to put missiles there.
Most people could not list the Presidents...
Kennedy ** Would NOT ** have made my list... (sheesh!)
Calvin Coolidge???
George W Bush is definitely in my bottom five. One of the worst presidents we have ever had.
Amen! Preach on!
If only Richard Nixon had shaved on the afternoon of September 26, 1960, before his first televised debate with JFK, the world might be a vastly different and better place today.
You forgot Kennedy’s Wall in Berlin.
Au contraire. Harding was an excellent President. He resolved the Wilson Depression in rapid order, cut taxes and was the last President to actually cut the size of government. He was predictably hated by leftist academia and the media. Coolidge merely carried on Harding’s policies.
Coolidge had a big black mark with his sole appointment to SCOTUS with left-wing Harlan Fiske Stone. Stone was so well-regarded by the left and FDR that the latter made him Chief Justice.
He’d have been lucky to serve the 6 months he lived in 1953. The good news is that Gen. MacArthur would’ve been his running mate and would’ve served the remaining 7 1/2 years.
I think Taft would have beaten Truman in 48.
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