Of course you can take that game further -- Nixon gave us Ford and Carter, but they gave us Reagan, and the Nixon era helped kill off Rockefeller Republicanism so things worked out in the end -- but that's probably going too far. You have to look at what they were in their own time. Nixon had great opportunities. He fulfilled some of them and grossly squandered others. I don't know what history will finally make of him. It's interesting to speculate. Did Nixon's failure kill an earlier "consensus" or moderate style of politics, or was it already doomed by the polarization of the 1960s? Did his disgrace postpone a conservative age or make one possible? But when Nixon left office it was pretty clear that he'd really soured things for the country and his party.
Nicollo, what about Taft and Wilson? Is Taft responsible for Wilson's taking office with 41.8% of the popular vote? Is Roosevelt responsible for it? Did Taft's troubles give TR his opening? Or was Teddy such a force of nature that nothing could have stopped him from trying to get back into politics? Or was TR responsible to begin with for having made such bad choices earlier?
In the end, though, we have to hold Wilson, FDR, Carter and the rest for what they actually did themselves. Wilson made his own miscalculations and mistakes. All the more so, since what voters expected them to do wasn't what they actually did. But it's not just whether or not presidents agree with us that makes them good or bad.
Gross incompetence or corruption or simple inability to cope with problems make bad presidents just as much as bad ideas. The next question is whether we make a distinction between the corrupt, the incompetent and those who worked earnestly and in good faith to deal with problems that proved unsurmountable.
Nixon gave us Ford and Carter, but they gave us Reagan, and the Nixon era helped kill off Rockefeller Republicanism so things worked out in the end...LOL! Yes, that may be taking it too far... except, honestly, that's how history works. I think we give historical actors too much credit for the good and the bad. Certaintly individuals impact history, but more often than not they are products of their times as much as innovators -- catalysts not original agents.
As for your thoughts on the '12 election, I subscribe to the old theory that TR/Taft together took the majority Pubbies and Wilson got the minority Dimmies. Even by 1916 the sway was held by TR progressives, as you know in the Hiram Johnson story. There's a huge "what if" that excites Political Scientists (oh, what a magnificently Progressive term!) well beyond reason as to what if it were TR v Wilson, or Wilson v Taft alone. They often look to CA, which was, by virtue of H. Johnson's disenfranchisement of Republicans, TR v Wilson alone, and which was won by Wilson. That's a bad example, for it was part of the larger problem that year.
My view is that 1912 was inevitible. Taft competently presided over a break in the Republican party that had to come given TR's prodding during his presidency, and in choosing the "Old Guard" Taft defined the party thereafter. TR, for his part, defined the Democratic party come 1932.
What's amazing about the Wilson presidency is that his first term was more Taft's 2nd term than his own. Wilson's tariff revision was, honestly, not far from what Taft would have accepted had the Taft Tariff Board been allowed to function. The Fed Act, the Clayton Act, the income tax, etc. were all defined under Taft. The only difference between Wilson's first term and Taft was Wilson's democratic spin on what Taft set in motion. Taft, for example, would have kept the corporate income tax instead of putting in a personal income tax. And he would never have given labor the anti-trust exemption that Wilson gave it in the Clayton Act. Into Wilson's 2nd term, and WWI, however, they went different ways. Taft would have gone into the War reluctantly, as well, and he would have sought some kind of international body afterwards, but Wilson went overboard, well beyond where Taft, or his heir (in Hughes), would have gone. Taft would never have allowed all those wartime controls and never so long as did Wilson, and he would not have been nearly so arrogant as Wilson was at Versailles.
Hope that makes sense.
Btw, have you read David Burton's book, "Confident Peacemaker"?