Obama boasts to CBS: I'm 4th best president

Democrats take FDR's "hundred days" of legislation as the standard by which they judge administrations. LBJ's 89th Congress came closest to Roosevelt's 73rd in generating new legislation. Obama pushed for the health bill because he wanted to be the next in that FDR, LBJ sequence.

Lincoln's administration wasn't the same thing. Lincoln had his hands full with the war and his conception of the presidency was, at least in theory, very different from FDR's or LBJ's. He wasn't riding Congress to get an ambitious legislative program passed.

In the Senate were Republicans of long experience in both state and national office. William Pitt Fessenden, Charles Sumner, Henry Wilson, Zachariah Chandler, Jacob Collamer, Lyman Trumbull, Benjamin F. Wade, and John P. Hale had long senatorial service behind them, while David Wilmot, John Sherman, and others had been in the House of Representatives. With such political talent in the legislature, Lincoln made no effort to assume leadership in legislation. He had, indeed, no legislative program to promote, and faced none of the problems of the legislative leader who needed to bargain and cajole, to coerce and to compromise to get support for a bill. On the other hand, he had a war to conduct, and needed the support of an integrated national party to bring it to a successful conclusion. -- William P. Hesseltine in Don E. Fehrenbacher, editor, The Leadership of Abraham Lincoln

Woodrow Wilson would be a better choice. He started that succession of liberal Presidents chomping at the bit to pass an extensive legislative program through Congress. But of course, Wilson's name doesn't win votes nowadays.

Wilson, Roosevelt, Johnson all got a lot of legislation passed because they had large majorities in Congress, but is the passage of a lot of bills really the standard of Presidential greatness? Congress, lobbyists, and think tanks have a lot of legislative projects lying around just waiting for a party to get a big majority to pass it. Even if you assume that the legislation is good -- which is a big assumption -- the president may not be a very big factor in making the bills law.

Obama's comparison of foreign policy achievements in his first two years makes even less sense. FDR wasn't very much concerned with foreign policy in his first term. Lincoln's only interest in foreign policy was trying to keep Europe from intervening in the Civil War. And LBJ's term was studded with foreign policy miscalculations. Such successes as Obama's administration has had in foreign policy came in the second half of his term.

Obama’s choices for the Top Four are very telling. He is clearly a black first, and an American second. Those four presidents did more for blacks than any others. Lincoln freed the slaves (while the Democrats fought to keep slavery), FDR’s New Deal laid all the groundwork for the Welfare State, LBJ’s Great Society began transfers of trillions of dollars of blacks over the past few decades (which cemented blacks as a permanent dependent underclass, apparently to their great delight), and Obama has accelerated the deluge of taxpayer funds. Nothing else makes sense in that list of four names.

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