[ViLaLuz]

Obama occupies a kind of middle territory...
........................

What? Ha ha ha!

[eyedigress]

George Bush did rather well. Obama completely sucked.

The Junior Varsity came in after Bush.

[central_va]

The Illinois Butcher™ tops my list as worst.

[Morgan in Denver]

I have to opine. Does this list include the police action known as Korea? Also, what about Jefferson’s retaliation against the Muslims at Gibraltar and Ronald Reagan’s quick action in Granada? Then, there’s Clinton’s bombing of some huts and an aspirin factory to consider.

[TADSLOS]

Obama is in a class by himself as our FIRST _resident TRAITOR.

[oh8eleven]

LBJ ... instantly saw the fateful implications in the “damn mess,” as he called Vietnam.
He even asked his friend and mentor, Georgia’s Democratic senator Richard Russell, to attack the Vietnam commitment on the Senate floor so he could use the speech as cover for withdrawal.
But Russell declined, and Johnson plunged ahead with a policy that took the country’s military commitment from 16,700 military advisers to a full-flung expeditionary force of nearly 540,000 troops ...

Short of the current communist-in-chief now in the WH, has any president done more to screw up America than LBJ?

[HonkyTonkMan]

Lincoln - other conflicts cannot top 625,000 military deaths. Inept leadership, disjointed cabinet, anaconda plan, liberian plan, etc. 420 deaths each day.

[Mad Dawgg]

If you are going on pure military results. Bush 1 presided over a severe ass-kicking handed out by Stormin’ Norman and the U.S. Armed Forces in the Gulf War.

[Labyrinthos]

What happened to Clinton?

[Verginius Rufus]

More Americans died in the "Philippine Insurrection" than in the Spanish-American War, but Teddy Roosevelt does not make the list (that war was still going on when McKinley was assassinated).

Wilson led the US to victory in WWI...it was the peace settlement afterwards which was a failure ("the peace to end peace").

[x]

Madison is subject of ongoing historical debate as to his success or failure as wartime president, but I consider him, on balance, more of a success than a failure, for reasons outlined in my book, Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.

Merry, fleeing your house before it's burned down doesn't make one a successful president.

I guess maybe we can get beyond the 19th century territorial idea that having your capital taken over by the enemy automatically means losing a war, but still, dude, you can't exactly hold your head high if something like that happens on your watch, especially if the war wasn't the most necessary of fights.

Bearing in mind that Truman probably does get too much of a pass as it is from historians and the public, I'd put Madison on that list of worst war presidents.

I'd give TR a pass for the Philippines. Voters supported McKinley's policy in the election and TR was just following through. We can object now, but at the time, it would have been hard to reverse course.

Not sure if I'd give Nixon a pass, but the greater blame for Vietnam goes to Johnson (with Kennedy, Eisenhower, and Truman also carrying their share).

What about the moral aspect, though? Polk must have been a superior wartime president, but the morality of Mexican War has long been called into question.