Posted on 08/12/2005 3:25:54 PM PDT by hang 'em
Who is/was the WORST U.S. PRESIDENT EVER? Carter? Clinton? Make your choice and state your reasons.
I think Hillary was the worst president we ever had.
1) King Lincoln
2) FDR
3) LBJ
It's a stupid idea, because if you let such things go unchecked, they start to look like an unstoppable wave of the future. If we followed such advice, we would have given into every evil under the sun in the hope that it would just go away on its own. That's hardly wise policy. I'm not saying that we go out of our way to slay dragons, but if they come at us, we shouldn't stay our hand because of some theory of economic history that later generations may come up with. If things have worked out for the best in the past, it's at least in part due to the fact that people didn't flinch when action was needeed or give into comforting ideas of economic inevitability.
It all depends on who's ox is being gored -- on who suffers. I doubt most African-Americans would agree with your belief that yielding to the slaveowners on everything would have made things better for them. That was the slave owner's attitude throughout history -- "Give me everything a want and all will be well" -- but slaves and their descendants thought differently. I doubt most Poles or other Eastern Europeans would share your servile philosophy either. But reading your tag line about the "god" of the market suggests that arguing with you is probably futile. Some things do sort themselves out on their own, without people taking action intentionally, but many don't. If you don't recognize that or if you take people's efforts at fighting tyranny or slavery lightly, there's not much point in continuing the argument.
Right now... I have the Rapist leading by a c-hair.
Announcing a withdrawal from the union, declaring oneself not bound by the law of the land, repudiating debts, seizing and destroying of federal property, forming a rival league, calling for an army, firing on US troops -- these were all serious violations of the Constitution. Not abiding with the Dred Scot decision -- if that's what happened was a lesser matter. Perhaps the government would have been with it's right to impose the decision on the states but it's hardly the same as what happened in 1861.
But seriously, the states were virtually autonomous before the Civil War.
But seriously, they weren't. They didn't have the right to coin money, deliver mail, raise an army, declare war, or make treaties with foreign powers. They'd given up a lot of power and the attributes of sovereignty.
The only federal official the people knew was the postmaster.
The hand of government -- especially the federally government -- was light in early 19th century America, but that doesn't mean that the states were sovereign, or that the federal government didn't have powers of its own under the constitution.
Secession was just the next step and not specifically proscribed by the Constitution.
Look at the supremacy clause of the Constitution -- the Constitution and federal laws take presidence over state laws in the federal sphere. Any change in the status of a state couldn't be achieved by the state alone. A "right to secession" was something read into the Constitution by a loose and sloppy reading of the document.
What settled the matter was military action. The Civil War was a second Revolution, but this time the rebels lost.
The revolutionaries of 1776 could make a far better case than the rebels of 1861. In 1776 the colonists had no voice in Parliament. They believed that they had no other way to influence things but to demonstrate and petition. When that channel was closed by the Crown's military action, they took up arms.
The secessionists of 1861 had been represented in Congress -- even overrepresented. They had plenty of channels to resolve things peacefully. But they rejected such Constitutional channels, and unconstitutionally broke with the rest of the country.
Clinton for everything else.
Since Washington's administration a compact theory of the Union, which emphasized the voluntary nature of the Union, had many supporters. even New England was willing to invoke it during the War of 1812. Webster, who so eloquently articulated the idea of a permanent union in 1831, had had quite a different view tin 1813. Lincoln, like Webster a Whig, simply adopted Webster's theory of the Union. in opposition to the Jeffersonian- Calhoun view. Since his side won, that settled the matter, although the lawyers were able to cover up the cracks in the original constitution by means of the 13th and 14th Amendments. Stylistically, the change in view of the country was reflected in the pre-war references that the United States "are," as opposed to 'is" after the war.
The federal government likewise had to turn to the National Guard during Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and probably WWII as well. That doesn't mean that the states are sovereign now. I don't know the exact legal situation of the national guard, but it's not as though the New York National Guard is New York's own army.
Calhoun's theory of government wasn't that of Washington or Marshall. It was quite a questionable theory. Jackson and Madison both rejected it. Most Americans agreed with them in the 1831 nullification crisis. You can find a good overview of constitutional theories here.
The bit about the Civil War changing "the United States are" into "the United States is" is striking, but I'm not sure how solid it is. British usage, and perhaps earlier American usage, requires a use a plural verb for collective nouns. Current US usage doesn't. I don't know all the details, but I wouldn't assume it took a war to change that.
The Civil War did change a lot, but some people assume that everything was the opposite before. If the federal government has power now or if we're one country, they assume the states had to be running things or that we were a loose league of independent states before Lincoln. I'm not sure that's right. The relationship of the federal government and the states and the constitutionality of secession were certainly debateable then. But "debatable" means that people disagreed then, not that the agreed on the opposite of what's accepted now.
I am sorry, I think that using the democratic procedures and victim status to find what is true is a complete nonsense.
Did you ever nominate whom you think is the worst president ever? Just curious.
Then you have to consider two pretty much acknowledged failures: Hoover and Carter.
Beyond that, I don't know. Harding and Grant didn't do the presidency any service. If the criteria is managerial ability they score low, but how much permanent harm did they do the country?
FDR did a lot of harm, but the country did get through some really difficult times under his leadership without losing its representative system of government. So how do you balance out the good and bad?
The ones historians will puzzle over for a long time are the two Johnsons and Nixon. Once Andrew Johnson was a hero for saving the presidency. Now some historians see him as possibly the worst President for having botched Reconstruction and representing the worst racial attitudes, untempered by more humane concerns.
If someone names Lyndon Johnson as the most horrible President of the twentieth century, I won't argue. There's a lot to be said for that. The question is to what degree the resolution of the civil rights question outweighs Vietnam and the mess at home. I don't have an answer to that.
Nixon is another president we'll puzzle over for a long time. I'd understand if someone hates him. But would Humphrey or McGovern have done better with the cards America had thirty-five years ago?
We're fortunate that Reagan brought the country back in the 1980s or we'd have to judge Nixon and Johnson and Carter a lot more harshly. Another country with other leaders would have real trouble overcoming what we went through in the Sixties and Seventies.
How about yours?
LBJ is the worst going away, his abuse or power, his facilitation of a dependency class, his knowing wasting of American lives on a lost cause, a loss he facilitated and extended, and his letting of the inflation genie out of the bottle. Carter is perhaps second. We were lucky to get Reagan to undo the damage. Jackson might be number 3, for the spoils system, and what he did to the Indians.
I rank FDR as the third BEST president, for getting the US through the depression without a revolution, for many of the institutions he created, such as social security and the SEC, and the banking regulations, and of course, for his saving of Europe from its lights going out, perhaps forever.
What war in Europe/bombing of London?
The Great Depression was triggered by the stock market crash in October 1929.
WWII didn't start until 1939.
Yep, I'd say Carter, too. He didn't seem to be able to shift his executive skills to the larger job of being president. Like Clinton, who was awful and will always be remembered as not too bad because he was also lucky not to have to deal with some major disaster (we were lucky about that, too), he just wasn't up to the requirements of the job.
And like Clinton he didn't just slink away after he wasn't president anymore. I'd say that's a triumph of ego over the facts. It amazes me every time I see one of their faces on the news.
I rank FDR as the third BEST president, for getting the US through the depression without a revolution...I really don't understand this proposition. You're saying that had FDR not adopted his New Deal reforms the country would have gone into revolution? What's the evidence?
By my studies, the empowerment of the radical elements followed and did not precede the New Deal. Furthermore, FDR was elected on a conservative plank. Where was the revolution in '32?
I more or less agree with the ratings. On the whole it looks like a more balanced list than we usually see. They asked equal samples of Democrats and Republicans or liberals and conservatives to rate the Presidents.
Lyndon Johnson is too high. You can't do that much damage and expect to remain "average." I might also drop Ike a peg or two. I don't have anything against him, but his presidency wasn't as significant as Polk's or Jackson's, though he is more agreeable to modern racial attitudes. I'd probably also kick Harding a place or two up the list. He didn't do any lasting damage.
Madison is problematic. You don't let a foreign army burn down the White House and end up that well thought of. Rutherford B. Hayes is also surprisingly high. That may not be so strange. Maybe he really was an average President all across the board, as opposed to more powerful 20th century Presidents who did much good and much harm to the point where it balances out in the end. Still, the man who ended Reconstruction ... Grant and Andrew Johnson have more or less switched places, because of changing attitudes towards post-Civil War policy.
I'm not especially happy with how high they've put Woodrow Wilson, John Kennedy, and Bill Clinton. But it's a change from the earlier surveys that put Wilson in the "near great" category. It's also striking that Coolidge and Hoover don't wind up in the cellar, where liberal historians had put them for some time.
The Presidents at the bottom are those without any constituency today, though. Except for Harding, they're Whigs or pro-slavery, anti-Black Democrats from the Civil War era, and nobody has any trouble with where they end up. More recent controversial figures -- Hoover, Johnson, Nixon, Carter, Clinton -- are saved from the cellar by their supporters. Nobody's going to go out on a limb for Buchanan or Pierce, Tyler or Fillmore.
Carter, because we are still suffering the effects 25 years after his disasterous presidency.
I agree with your comments (as you know I think LBJ was the worst president in history), except I think Wilson is right where he should be. He created the federal reserve system, which while the kooks don't like it, is critical to running a modern economy.
I can't prove there would have been a revolution, just that it was a risk. And Huey Long was waiting in the wings. Roosevelt was very worried about Huey.
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