Posted on 08/12/2005 3:25:54 PM PDT by hang 'em
Well Jimmy Carters grain embargo damn near bankrupted all of the farmers in the midwest and what did we gain? The countries we embargoed just buy from south america now.
Arguably, the real reason Ronald Reagan looks great is that he followed Jimmy Carter. Of course, there I go again ...
Woodrow Wilson by far the worst. His administration led to a MASSIVE INCREASE IN FEDERAL POWER
Federal Reserve
INCOME TAX
League of Nations (now the UN)
FTC
Got us into WWI to bail out the NY bankers who had financed France and Great Britian
Direct election of Senators
Soviet establishment lost propaganda war because of Carter. Ronald Reagan had something to build on.
Lincoln did the greatest damage to the black and to the country. The slavery would be abolished without bloodshed within a short time as the institutions of slavery and serfdom were being removed in EVERY civilized country at that time.
But if done peacefully, gradually and by consensus it would lead to the enfranchisement of blacks and granting them the same land and resources for startup as white settlers were getting.
In addition the original sovereignty of the sates would be preserved and federal government would not become the main dominating center of American political life.
Clinton. I hear there were others sort of like him long ago before I was around though. Maybe in personal proclivities they were similar, but I have a hard time believing these other previous presidents would have sold US classified info to our FRIENDS much less our enemies.
He wasn't responsible for that. I thought the war in Europe/bombing of London was more responsible for that.
A big reason why slavery was abolished in so many countries was the defeat of the Confederacy. It signalled that slavery was definitely on its way out. Spain and Brazil probably would have kept slavery longer if the Confederacy had been successful, and a powerful country run by the "slave power" would be a focus for efforts to spread the institution.
Would we have slavery in North America today without Lincoln? Probably not, it would have been abolished at some point. Though "at some point" might mean well into the 20th century. And even then, abolition might have been purely formal. Does that mean that abolition in 1865 rather than in 1880 or 1900 or 1920 justified the great losses of war? The thing is that you don't see those losses in advance. Had people known that war would take hundreds of thousands of lives, they might well have done things differently, but unionists acted according to the best knowledge that they had at the time.
But that line of arguing's a little insulting. Nazism didn't last in Poland. Nor did Communism. But ought the Poles simply have sat back, folded their hands, and done nothing confident that eventually history or economics would set everything to rights and vanquish the inefficient system? I don't argue that the two cases are exactly the same, but there are similarities. Nowadays, some people assume that left alone, conditions would inevitably have advanced by themselves to what we have now without anyone taking action, and that's just not true.
But if done peacefully, gradually and by consensus it would lead to the enfranchisement of blacks and granting them the same land and resources for startup as white settlers were getting.
That's wishful thinking. Confederates probably would have gotten rid of slavery at some point, but they wouldn't have set up Blacks as equals or given them a share of their own resources.
In addition the original sovereignty of the sates would be preserved and federal government would not become the main dominating center of American political life.
Again, that's wishful thinking. I'm not sure just how "sovereign" the states were in 1840 or 1850 or just how much was really changed in federal-state relations by the Civil War. But the idea that without the Civil War history would just have stopped at 1860 without further changes, looks naive. So does the notion that a real system of "sovereign states" would be better than a more federal system. Government could have grown much as it did over the last two and a half centuries. Or the country could have fallen apart completely into warring states.
"State sovereignty" looks a lot like a recipe for chaos, like Africa today or Poland under the liberum veto. I don't say Lincoln was our best President, just that the arguments of those who think him the worst don't hold up very well.
Teams and tribes probably have a lot to with it. If you were a liberal Democrat and a professor, Wilson was the first of your kind to be elected president. Maybe you even went to Washington or Paris with him. So you taught your students that this was the dawn of the new day, and they might believe you and go to Washington with FDR. And the same would be true of their students and Kennedy/Johnson. This generational sucession was a big part of American liberalism. It was it's founding myth, at least until Carter and Clinton dropped the ball.
If you were a conservative, you'd see Wilson as the beginning of a bad trend, and judge him accordingly. So Taft comes out as the anti-Wilson, and has to be built up. The alternative -- that there was nobody in American politics to oppose trends like the Income Tax Amendment or direct election of Senators or the Federal Reserve -- is too hard to take.
Personalities also must have been important. It's hard to think of Taft being quite as self-righteous, self-centered, arrogant, and domineering as Wilson was at the end of his presidency. So we form an image of Wilson's whole Presidency based on his second term. What if Wilson had been defeated in 1916? Perhaps he wouldn't have been so much the liberal hero or the conservative villain as he later became, and perhaps the ideological differences between the parties wouldn't have developed until later.
How important was Wilson's "presidential" style -- addressing Congress directly and giving it an ambitious legislative agenda? How much of a departure from earlier Presidents was it? Presidential activism certainly does make him look like the precursor of FDR and Johnson, and helped to establish the oppositions of American politics: Wilson Democrats vs. Taft Republicans rather than Cleveland Democrats vs. Roosevelt Republicans. Even TR looked less a proponent of presidential power than Wilson. How did a supporter of "Congressional Government" come around to such a position?
Not true my dear. The slavery in other countries was abolished BEFORE the Civil War. Even serfdom in Russia was abolished just as Civil War started (serfdom in Russia was the last remaining in Europe). And slavery was eradicated much earlier than serfdom!
No, bloody Civil War was very bad and the following abandonment of American blacks who did not get any help to stand on their feet not any better.
The main thing Lincoln achieved was the destruction of the sovereignty of states and creating powerful central government.
Nobody attacked Nazism. It was Nazism which attacked others, overextended itself and was crushed by the Soviet Communists (with the help of USA and England). Communism was not overthrown by force, it was the "history or economics" which "set everything to rights and vanquish[ed] the inefficient system" from inside. We must live on parallel universes, Sir.
Johnson
CARTER: Because I'm fairly young, and my frame of reference is limited. But he pulled the Persian rug out from under the feet of the Shah, and you can trace all this fundamentalist Islamofacist crap right back to Khomeini.
CLINTON: Number 2, for obvious reasons.
GEORGE W BUSH: Quickly moving up the list. Five years in, and our borders are still porous. And, all evidence to the contrary, he continues to insist that "Islam is a religion of peace." (Did like the tax cuts, though. The economy is doing very well, in spite of what we read in the MSM.)
BEST? RONALD REAGAN (I know this wasn't asked, but I just had to throw it in.)
He should be hung.
What if Wilson had been defeated in 1916? Perhaps he wouldn't have been so much the liberal hero or the conservative villain as he later became, and perhaps the ideological differences between the parties wouldn't have developed until later.Absolutely. His first term was nothing more than a Cleveland term or the other. WWI saved his political a$$, first in opposition to it, and then for involvement in it. What the WW liberals love is his 2nd term, absolutely. They'd have so little to go with otherwise -- especially this, your excellent characterization of his 2nd term:
self-righteous, self-centered, arrogant, and domineering...That character was there during the 1st term, but, as with TR's 1st term, the political hedge moderated excess.
As for Wilson's "presidential style," I'm not sure the State of the Union address given at Congress really changed much. It was dramatic, however, and thereby cannot be ignored. (Btw, Taft holds that modern honor of a Prez addressing the Congress directly, for he presided over a joint House-Senate session in honor of the deceased VP Sherman in 1912.) Wilson was a very, very good speaker. I think it only added to his general political advance and agenda. The Dems were on a roll, and he rolled with it.
And, certainly, his "style" most definitely was an extension of the TR model. I'd add Taft and McKinley to it, for both of those used the presidency effetively. McKinley's management of the Span-Am war was superb and dramatic. Taft employed modern transport, media, and commmunication to great effect and the deliberate purpose of bringing the presidency to the American people. More Americans saw Taft during his presidency than had they seen of any other president.
Furthermore, Wilson was acting on Taft's lead for more Executive-Legislative coordination. Taft even proposed a constitutional amendment to give Cabinet officers permanent, non-voting seats in Congress. He wanted greater coordination and discussion, which was part of the period's efforts to remove politics from government.
Anyway, I agree entirely that the moderns of any period read themselves into history whenever and wherever they can. Absolutely, and that's why to me history is so fascinating. I know I'm guilty of it. Unlike others, however, I'll admit it...
I'm surprised you don't have George W. Bush on that list.
ROFLOL! Insanity, man! Insanity!!
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