Posted on 02/13/2013 7:59:52 AM PST by Kaslin
As President Obama prepares his State of the Union Address and the nation looks forward to a Presidents Day holiday, Americans should consider the warning examples of our worst chief executives.
While few of Washington and Lincoln's successors could hope to replicate their epic achievements, every president can — and must — focus on avoiding the appalling ineptitude of John Tyler, Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan and their feckless fellow travelers on the road to presidential perdition. The common elements that link our least successful leaders teach historical lessons at least as important as the shared traits of the Rushmore Four: Broken promises and gloomy temperaments lead inevitably to an alienated public.
All the chief executives unmistakably identified as failures displayed a self-destructive tendency to violate the core promises of their campaigns. Take Tyler, the unbending Virginia aristocrat who won election to the vice presidency in 1840 and assumed the highest office when his predecessor died just a month after inauguration. The new chief executive, dubbed "His Accidency" by critics, used 10 unpopular vetoes to block implementation of his own party's longstanding ledges. Most of his Cabinet resigned in protest, and eventually they all quit while the hostile Senate voted down four new Cabinet appointments — a record that stands to this day.
Between 1853 and 1861, Pierce and Buchanan completed back-to-back disastrous terms in which personal weakness and pro-Southern sympathies shattered confident promises of unifying leadership. Buchanan pledged to stop "agitation of the slavery question" and to "destroy sectional parties." By the end of his term, seven Southern states seceded from the union and the nation lunged toward the Civil War.
After that war and Lincoln's assassination, Andrew Johnson (Lincoln's vice president) defied members of the martyred president's Cabinet and congressional leaders, ignoring commitments to lead former slaves to dignity and full civil rights.
In the 20th century, Herbert Hoover's slogan promised "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage," but he presided over the beginning of the Great Depression. Similarly, Jimmy Carter's 1976 platform pledged to reduce unemployment to 3%, but Carter ran for re-election with more than twice that rate.
No wonder that Hoover and Carter, like other unsuccessful presidents, came across as gloomy, self-righteous sufferers. Hoover's secretary of State said that a meeting with him was "like sitting in a bath of ink." Carter staked his presidency on a notoriously sour televised address that became known as "The Malaise Speech," warning the appalled public of a "crisis of the American spirit."
None of our least successful presidents displayed the self-deprecatory humor of Lincoln or the sunny dispositions that powered the Roosevelts (Theodore and Franklin) and Ronald Reagan. A visitor described the Pierce White House as a "cold and cheerless place," noting the isolation of the invalid first lady, in deep mourning for three dead sons.
When Buchanan welcomed successor Lincoln, he plaintively declared: "My dear, sir, if you are as happy on entering the White House as I on leaving, you are a very happy man indeed."
The result of the depressing and erratic leadership of our six most conspicuous presidential failures is that all managed to estrange a once-admiring electorate within the space of a single term. Tyler,Pierce, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan all earned rejection by their own party, failed to win their own party's nominations, entering retirement as discredited figures. Hoover and Carter appeared on national tickets and campaigned vigorously but got wiped out in historic landslides, with each incumbent carrying a mere six states.
Democrats, who denounce George W. Bush as the worst president ever, along with Republicans who apply the same ugly title to Barack Obama, can't explain away the inconvenient fact that both of our most recent incumbents won re-election with 51% of the vote. Regardless of controversies blighting Bush's second term, or setbacks that might afflict Obama's, their legislative and electoral successes place them in a different category from the White House worst.
This baleful history should warn the current occupant and all successors against visibly disregarding commitments while encouraging voters to steer clear of presidential candidates with dour, inflexible temperaments. By selecting aspirants with clear, consistent agendas and cheerful, persuasive personalities, we'll face fewer shattered presidencies that leave reviled incumbents and a disillusioned electorate.
Well I guess that says everything about the southron slavers. You know - the ones actually responsible for those 640,000 American lives lost during the War of Southron Betrayal.
Thanks.
Responsibility for all the deaths belongs to those who started and formally declared war on the United States.
Now I'm out of time again, must run.
See you again another day...
The quote is from Abraham Lincoln” First inaugural address given March 4, 1861.
http://quotes.dictionary.com/The_power_confided_in_me_will_be_used
Actually, I was just speculating on whether it would have been better if the Union had lost the Civil War. I regret the Spanish-American War and American involvement in the Great War. What if the Confederacy had agreed to end slavery, on the condition that the Union agree to separation in prior to the 1864 election? I’m pretty sure the states of the Confederacy would be better off today, and Union might be better off, too, provided the whole country didn’t turn into post 1960 Massachusetts.
That would have required a Constitutional amendment. No one offered one, so we'll never know.
Except that England attempted to inflict taxes on colonies that were not subject to taxation by the English parliment.
When those illegal taxes were resisted, England made war on the the various colonies.
Only after having England make war on the colonies did the colonies declare independence.
By contrast, the so called confederates began their insurrection with theft and treason to support slavery. They made war by firing on US soldiers performing their duty.
There can be good revolutions, justified by culture, geography and good sense. That of 1775 was a good one. There can be good insurrections. That of 1860-1865 was not one.
No, it was the confederates who put their pretended disunion above human life. Further, the slave owners put their profits above human life.
That was why they pursued their illegal and immoral insurrection.
Big government? You mean the kind of big government that gave R.E. Lee immunity from raping his slaves? The kind of big government that permited R.E. Lee to sell white children to brothels if he claimed they were slaves? The kind that allowed him to buy poor whites from slave catchers? The kind that asserted that once it was alleged that you were a slave that you had no right to defend yourself in court?
That kind of big government?
Imagine the Great War taking place in North America, with the trench line beginning somewhere in Pennsylvania and ending in Arizona, because the pretended Confederacy was on the side of Austria-Hungary... Certainly they wouldn’t support freedom for Slavs or Slaves.
Imagine the Spanish American War taking place with the South demanding Cuba as a new slave state.
You can imagine a lot of scenarios, but I suspect that it is unlikely that the Confederacy and Union would ever take up arms against one another again, for the same reason that we have never gone to war with Canada. North America did not have the population density to support trench warfare on that scale at the beginning of the last century. The Confederacy would be too worried about Mexico and the Union to pick a fight with Spain.
One undesirable effect of the Civil War was that it inflated progressives’ already embolistic self-righteousness and left them looking for new causes (a lot like what Vietnam did to the Boomers), with Spain and later Germany becoming their targets. For Boomers, it was the environment mostly that has suffered from their need to embrace some cause, any cause. Think of a country run by Soledad O’Brien, and you have turn of the last century America.
Well I guess that says everything about the southron slavers. You know - the ones actually responsible for those 640,000 American lives lost during the War of Southron Betrayal.””
A truely despicable comment. I have two relatives buried at Vicksburg and both fought for the North.
Yes, the kind of oppressive govt that doesn’t just enslave, but has an insatiable hunger for the blood of 640,000 mostly young boys. Govt is nothing but an org chart but has you convinced it is worth the lives of so many people is indeed a sick and inhuman thought.
There was much more to it than taxation, and in fact, it WAS legal for Britain to do so. It was their rules, their territory, and common practice.
American rebels resisted, eventually with arms. That enraged many Britons including the colonists. It was much more bro vs bro than our so-called civil war.
You are simply wrong.
Speaking of truely(sic) despicable comments.
No Freeper would condone the killing of his fellow Americans with desires to simply be left alone.
What’s that got to do with anything?
Review Lincoln’s directives to kill American resistance.
You are correct, but your quote is just inaccurate enough to fail my very hasty word search in Lincoln's First Inaugural.
Actual words: "...power confided to me..."
So here are Lincoln's words, in context:
"In doing this there need be no bloodshed or violence, and there shall be none, unless it is forced upon the national authority.
The power confided to me will be used to hold, occupy, and possess the property and places belonging to the government, and collect the duties and imposts; but beyond what may he necessary for these objects there will be no invasion—no using of force against or among the people any where.
"Where hostility to the United States shall be so great and so universal as to prevent competent resident citizens from holding the Federal offices, there will be no attempt to force obnoxious strangers among the people that object.
While the strict legal right may exist of the government to enforce the exercise of these offices, the attempt to do so would be so irritating and so nearly impracticable withal that I deem it better to forego for the time the uses of such offices."
Pontiac from post #92: "The only property belonging to the federal government that Lincoln said he is willing to invade the Confederate States to possess are two tax collection forts: Fort Sumter at the entrance to Charleston Harbor in South Carolina and Fort Pickens at the entrance to Pensacola Bay in Florida."
Lincoln's First Inaugural made no mention of Forts Sumter or Pickens.
Neither fort was, in your words a, "tax collection fort".
Pontiac: "Therefore, if there is to be a war, observers are predicting that Lincoln will start the war by invading Charleston Harbor with warships to hold Fort Sumter, a tax collection fort."
Fort Sumter was not a "tax collection fort" and was not considered as such by any "observers".
However, all that said, your words hold some truth, since those slave-holding secessionists who were itching, eager and determined to have war -- as a necessity to solidify their own leadership of the Confederacy -- they did interpret Lincoln's words as a "declaration of war", as all the excuse they needed to do what they had to do to launch the Confederate War of Aggression against the United States.
"Obviously, you worship this concept you call a Union.
You put an organizational unit above human life—you got a few screws loose somewhere.
Something is missing from you."
I'd say it's you who are missing something, and it's obvious what that is: respect for truth, honesty and accuracy.
Instead, you are devoted to the practice of flinging out wild accusations without basis in fact, just because it makes you feeeeeeeeel so good to say it, right?
But how good can you feeeeeel, if everything you say is nothing but rubbish?
Why not just say a few honest things, and be satisfied with that?
The fact of the matter is that the US Constitution, to which we owe due fealty, expressly deals with issues of "rebellion", "insurrection", "domestic violence", "invasion", "war" and "treason".
Those are all unlawful acts, and the Federal Government is required to defeat them.
Similar words are a constant refrain from our Neo-Confederate FRiends, but they reflect an apalling ignorance of historical facts and conditions in, say, 1860.
Over many years -- going all the way back to President Jefferson -- there had been several proposals to abolish slavery in the South peacefully by using Federal funds to purchase freedom for slaves.
All such proposals -- including ones devised by President Lincoln to free slaves in Union border states -- all were rejected out-of-hand by slave holders themselves.
And one major reason why is simple: African slaves were a great investment, none greater or more certain to produce long-term wealth increases.
They worked in the most difficult hot conditions, and made average Southerners -- slave-holders or not -- better off than their Northern counterparts.
As a result, slaves became identified with the very idea of Southern culture, so any suggestions that slavery was somehow "wrong" were not only unacceptable, they were offensive "fighting words".
My point is: don't even fantasize about the possibility of peacefully purchasing freedom for deep-south slaves in, say, 1860.
It was never going to happen.
I can tell by your expressions, you dot every i and cross every t because one size fits all and those who violate such nonsense deserve death. Tell me more about the rule of law when 20 million foreign invaders in the contemporary world are so easily permitted to ignore it. Like I said, my relatives died in that war you so sneeringly cast aside to justify their death.
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