Who Makes the Cut for the Worst Presidents Ever? (What a Question)

Townhall.com ^ | February 13, 2013 | Michael Medved

[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.

[BroJoeK]

BJK from post #217: "In 1775 as in 1861 American patriots stood for the United States, rule of law, limited representative government, and the concept that “all men are created equal..."

Pelham post #218: "And we find that definition of Patriot where, exactly?"

Try checking out the US Constitution.

Pelham: "Why, anyone who fails to be impressed with an amateur internet psychologist of your standing would have to be afflicted.
It surely couldn’t be that you make poor arguments and find a need to resort to ad hominem to save your sorry ass."

Sorry, but someone doesn't have to be an "amateur internet psychologist" to recognize confusion and disorientation when it's perfectly obvious in your posts, FRiend.
And that's especially true when you start throwing out totally unwarranted insults like: "your sorry ass".

By definition, and Free Republic charter rules, such insults are your own confession of having utterly, abjectly and self-admittedly lost the argument.

But hey! It's been tons of fun, maybe someday, after you've cooled down a bit, and gathered up some more facts we can do it all again... FRiend. ;-)

[Neoliberalnot]

Nothing much has changed. We still have bullies in the dc empire and the blue states that support them. It is our good fortune that since the war between the north and south, most of the new states in the intermountain region would likely side with those states that wish to be left alone in the South to enjoy their freedom and to accept personal responsibility.

[BroJoeK]

Neoliberalnot: "We still have bullies in the dc empire and the blue states that support them.
It is our good fortune that since the war between the north and south, most of the new states in the intermountain region would likely side with those states that wish to be left alone in the South to enjoy their freedom and to accept personal responsibility."

So far as I know, there is only one certain predictor of who will vote more conservative and who more liberal.
Conservatives are more rural, liberals more urban.

That means you can find lots of conservatives in the bluest of blue states, like Massachusetts, New York and California.
These Conservatives live in the more rural parts of those states, but sadly, far too few of them to have much effect.

And, you can find plenty of liberals in cities of the reddest of red states.
But in those states cities are small enough that more conservative voters still make majorities.

And this explains why Mountain States are usually more conservative, except where in cases like Denver, Colorado, their liberal populations are very near majorities.

That's why I think it's important to understand liberal vs. conservative not so much as "which state do you come from", but rather as "in which part of your state do you live?"

[Neoliberalnot]

The tone of your comments is certainly of a blue state mentality. Your excuse seems to be one of convenience. Your support of the dc empire that became a killing machine for both their own and those that they disagreed with does not fit the red state world view of smaller government that is supposed to serve, not kill, their countrymen. Good people from the South, are my brothers, not my enemy.

[rockrr]

The “bullies in the dc empire” in 1860 were the southron slavers.

[BroJoeK]

Neoliberalnot: "The tone of your comments is certainly of a blue state mentality.
Your excuse seems to be one of convenience."

It appears that you're clueless.
Facts are not "excuses", but they may suggest reasons why the United States keeps growing more liberal every election.
All you have to do is look at map by county of any presidential election, and you can see that cities vote Democrat, more rural areas vote Republican.

Here's a typical example (2004 Bush v Kerry), looks like I was wrong about Massachusetts, but nearly every other state has both red and blue counties:

Neoliberalnot: "Your support of the dc empire that became a killing machine for both their own and those that they disagreed with does not fit the red state world view of smaller government that is supposed to serve, not kill, their countrymen."

The basic constitutional function of any government, such as the United States, is to defend its citizens against military powers who attack and declare war on it, such as the Confederate States of America.
No real Confederate admitted that they were "countrymen" of Union citizens.
That's why they felt perfectly free to to start and declare war on the United States.

Neoliberalnot: "Good people from the South, are my brothers, not my enemy."

Half my family and relatives, including a brother, are Southerners -- some Deep South, some Upper South, some Border States.
The other half are northern, eastern and westerners.
Some live in cities, others in rural areas.
I love them all.

What is your problem with that, FRiend?

[jwalsh07]

By Medveds reckoning Saddam Hussein was a damn fine executive since he routinely got 90% of the vote. Medved gets votes for worst column on POTUS’ ever because any worst list that leaves that scumbag LBJ off of it ain’t worth spit. I mean the guy personally destroyed the urban family and sent tens of thousands of men to die in a shithole where LBJ and McNamara never had intention of winning. Medved is old enough to know that but he is of a class that could care less.

[donmeaker]

They also invented other words such as capitalist.

Glad you take offense at the term Slave Power. That tells us which side you are on, if there were any doubts.

[donmeaker]

“The Slave Power (often called the “Slaveocracy”) was a term used in the United States ca. 1840-1865 to denounce the political power of the slaveholding class in the South. The argument was that this small group of rich men had seized political control of their own states and was trying to take over the national government in illegitimate fashion to use it to expand and protect slavery.”

Note: that precedes the 1848 revolution that you traced it to. I began using it after reading Sumner.

“Between the slave power and states’ rights there was no necessary connection. The slave power, when in control, was a centralizing influence, and all the most considerable encroachments on states’ rights were its acts. The acquisition and admission of Louisiana; the Embargo; the War of 1812; the annexation of Texas “by joint resolution” [rather than treaty]; the war with Mexico, declared by the mere announcement of President Polk; the Fugitive Slave Law; the Dred Scott decision — all triumphs of the slave power — did far more than either tariffs or internal improvements, which in their origin were also southern measures, to destroy the very memory of states’ rights as they existed in 1789. Whenever a question arose of extending or protecting slavery, the slaveholders became friends of centralized power, and used that dangerous weapon with a kind of frenzy. Slavery in fact required centralization in order to maintain and protect itself, but it required to control the centralized machine; it needed despotic principles of government, but it needed them exclusively for its own use. Thus, in truth, states’ rights were the protection of the free states, and as a matter of fact, during the domination of the slave power, Massachusetts appealed to this protecting principle as often and almost as loudly as South Carolina.”

Second quote is from historian Henry Brooks Adams as he explained that the Slave Power was a force for centralization.

So if you are really for state’s rights and decentralization, you must be opposed to slavery. You can be opposed to other things, or for other things, but you must be opposed to slavery.

It would be nice if we could be sure that conservatives who post here that were for the Constitution, and opposed to treason.

Just in case you haven’t read Wikipedia.

[donmeaker]

The International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) or International Workers’ Association (1864–1876), often called the First International, was an international organization which aimed at uniting a variety of different left-wing socialist, communist[1] and anarchist political groups and trade union organizations that were based on the working class and class struggle.

That would put it after the abolitionists had been using the term “Slave Power” for 20 years. You are wrong again.

[donmeaker]

It is easy to understand that the Framers sought to put the institution of slavery on a path to gradual peaceful extinction. One way to do that was to permit freedmen to vote, as NC did until 1835. Another was to abolish the slave trade. Jefferson introduced legislation to make it easier to give slaves their freedom several times. Virginia never passed it, rather, they passed legislation making it more difficult.

Others who were not framers sought to make the institution of slavery more robust. Some did that because they owned slaves, or otherwise profited from them. Others did that for other reasons that I will not guess.

The institution of slavery was horrific. The abolition of slavery was one of very few good things to come out of the Civil War. It would have been a better world if the Slave Power had been willing to accept gradual and peaceful abolition. They were not.

[editor-surveyor]

Jefferson Davis didn’t have a ‘country,’ he led a collection of sovereign states that had a right to seceed that was recognized as unalienable by our founders.

Essentially, he was a victim of treasonous crime much like we are today.

[central_va]

If donmeaker makes a crazy post and no one reads it, did he really post it?

[editor-surveyor]

Worst from bottom up:

Obama

Carter

Clinton

LBJ

[editor-surveyor]

Kennedy pulled us out of the lingering effects of the depression with his tax cuts and monetary policies. (those are also what got him assasinated)

[EternalVigilance]

Worst from bottom up:

Obama

Carter

Clinton

LBJ

Yes, but Obama isn't done yet. He may still move lower in the rankings.

[donmeaker]

So do you argue with the framers putting slavery on a path to gradual extinction, via the consitutional provision that abolished the slave trade after 1808?

Or do you just do put out random attacks when history is against you?

[donmeaker]

Certainly the states had a right to seceed. The terms and methods were open to debate, doubt, and controversy.

And Controvery between states, or between a state and the federal government is to be resolved by law, with the SCOTUS as original jurisdiction.

But that wasn’t good enough for the Slave Power. They had to start a war. Then they lost, and that isn’t good enough for their modern day idolators.

[the OlLine Rebel]

Slight aside here.

Funny, I finally looked at JWR tonight for the first time in a while. Looked for Walt Williams’ column.

Guess what he wrote about while FR was down, in the middle of this thread/argument?

http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williamns022013.php3#.USwfD1fGA40

[donmeaker]

You may have noticed that the US fought WWI, despite not being either French or English.

Perhaps you noticed that we fought WWII, despite not being Polish, French, or Russian.

See, when wars happen, you can have allies fight on the same side. The French knew that in 1765, as they had Native American allies, just as Britain had the various colonies’ forces fighting along with the British regulars.

So glad I had the chance to explain it to you.