Worst Presidential Candidates

[SuperJerk 0]

2004 was a referendum on Bush. He had a 51% approval rating, and won 51% of the vote.

 

You could move some demographics around, but ultimately the final election totals probably would have come out the same almost no matter who you put up against Bush.

[CubbyBr 0]

If my memory serves me correct, wasn't Dean the big anti-war canidate during the primaries and the canidate that would bash Bush the most?

[SuperJerk 0]

Yes.

 

However, in November of 2004, the war was only a little more than a year old and there was still a majority of voters who were willing to give Bush the benefit of the doubt about it. There was even still a strong pro-war faction within the Democratic Party at that time.

 

Had Bush been running for reelection in 2005 or 2006, Dean would have destroyed Kerry and Edwards in the primaries, and gone on to when the White House easily.

[stormy 0]

Bush knew he would beat the odds and stay in the white house for the second term. Why? Because look at history we were solidly into his little war in the middle of the east. It takes a heck of a lot to change horses in mid stream as my grandfather use to say...People have a tendency to stay with the president during the war as long as he is eligable to use the second term because they think he knows whats going on...

 

Only exception to that was Gerald Ford..He was the only president to actually be elected. When he pardon Nixon was the downfall of his political carrear for the most part...Then there were those who said he never should have let the Viet Nam draft avaders come home without charges....Ford did it figuring the country needed to heal but the die hards didn't agree and that was when he lost the election to Jimmy Carter...and he wasn't the man either That when Regan came in and for the most part he was one of the popular ones...

[snuffbox 0]

Vietnam had ended by the time the election of 1976 rolled around. A more apt example, that defeats the premise of never changing presidents in wartime, would be the NH primary voters telling Truman it's definitly time to go in 1952.

[Nightwing 0]

Vietnam had ended by the time the election of 1976 rolled around. A more apt example, that defeats the premise of never changing presidents in wartime, would be the NH primary voters telling Truman it's definitly time to go in 1952.

It didn't help that Truman (rightfully) dismissed Douglas MacArthur, who was ridiculously popular at the time.

[snuffbox 0]

And, somehow, Estes Kefauver found himself wildly popular.

[SuperJerk 0]

Maybe hindsight is clouding my judgement (most people didn't realize how incompetent Bush was until after 2005), but given the state of the economy and world affairs in 2000....how the fuck did Al Gore lose? George W. Bush didn't have a single issue or vast surplus of charisma going for him to be able to do as well as he did...even given liberal apathy towards Gore at the time to lose votes to Nader...it still doesn't add up.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

He didn't.

 

ba dum cha

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

Timed for Presidents Day 2009, C-SPAN today releases the results of its second Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership, in which a cross-section of 65 presidential historians ranked the 42 former occupants of the White House on ten attributes of leadership.

 

Lincoln

Washington

FD Roosevelt

Teddy Roosevelt

Truman

Kennedy

Jefferson

Eisenhower

Wilson

Reagan

LB Johnson

Polk

Jackson

Monroe

Clinton

McKinley

John Adams

George HW Bush

John Quincy Adams

Madison

Cleveland

Ford

Grant

Taft

Carter

Coolidge

Nixon

Garfield

Taylor

Harrison

Van Buren

Arthur

Hayes

Hoover

Tyler

George W. Bush

Fillmore

Harding

WH Harrison

Pierce

A. Johnson

Buchanan

[SuperJerk 0]

My opinion: Reagan, Kennedy, Grant, and LBJ are too high, while Andrew Jackson is too low.

 

The top four are right, except I might switch FDR with Washington.

 

No comment on Nixon and Harding.

[Your Paragon of Virtue 0]

Stumbled onto this, pretty funny. Palin supporters in Ohio:

 

http://www.prosebeforehos.com/word-of-the-...-rally-in-ohio/

[snuffbox 0]

One of the most racist and genuinely dangerous presidents in our history gets ranked the ninth best. The man who returned the country to a progressive civil rights trajectory and did more for U.S. veterans than maybe any president ever (including beating up a guy for fucking with the vet benefit coffers) gets tossed into the bottom five.

[snuffbox 0]

How could poor William Henry Harrison possibly be a worse leader than George W. Bush. Even if you only give Junior the blame for one thing, that's still one more than old one-month.

[SuperJerk 0]

*sigh*

 

Here we go again...

 

Woodrow Wilson turned the United States into a world power. While he did segregate the civil service, his visionary ideas outweigh his reactionary (even for his time) views on race. Was Wilson more racist that, say, most of the first 15 presidents? I'm not crazy about Wilson either, but I understand why he was put where he was.

 

Warren Harding died before he could accomplish more than pass a budget reform act, though it was badly needed. The isolationist policies he championed were the opposite of what the world needed at the time. Though not his fault, his election signaled a moving away from the progressive ideals of Teddy Roosevelt and Wilson, ushering in perhaps the greatest era of greed and corruption of the 20th century. His quickly back-tracked from the anti-lynching law he proposed.

 

The guy on that list I see who put the U.S. on a progressive civil rights trajectory sits at #5, by the way.

[snuffbox 0]

Truman came after Harding.

[PUT THAT DICK IN MY MOUTH! 0]

how the fuck did Al Gore lose?

 

The media decided they hated him and committed blatant character assassination.

[At Home 0]

his visionary ideas

 

You mean his completely idealistic bullshit that he spewed out after claiming that this would be the "war to end all wars," and Europe would enjoy "peace without victory?" The same one who championed the Weimar Republic? The one who separated much of Europe into places that are still killing each other today?

 

[Art Sandusky 0]

If the US President had as much power then as he has today, you'd be justified in that. At the time, we were a brand new player on the European stage and the French/British combo was furious with Germany and a little scared. Look at the western European nations as the reason the East became such a mess and Germany was turned into a vaccum. Imagine how much more of a mess would come out of Russia being at Versailles as well.

[SuperJerk 0]

his visionary ideas

 

You mean his completely idealistic bullshit that he spewed out after claiming that this would be the "war to end all wars," and Europe would enjoy "peace without victory?" The same one who championed the Weimar Republic? The one who separated much of Europe into places that are still killing each other today?

No, I meant the 14 Points, the League of Nations, and American leadership in world affairs. And it would have worked too, if it weren't for those meddling kids (i.e. the Republicans in the U.S. Senate).

 

 

 

Truman came after Harding.

Yeah, and Truman is the one who actually helped civil rights by desegregating the military.

 

And Harding did what? Die in office after appointing a bunch of crooks to his cabinet. That didn't have a lot to do with helping minorities.

[Nightwing 0]

his visionary ideas

 

You mean his completely idealistic bullshit that he spewed out after claiming that this would be the "war to end all wars," and Europe would enjoy "peace without victory?" The same one who championed the Weimar Republic? The one who separated much of Europe into places that are still killing each other today?

No, I meant the 14 Points, the League of Nations, and American leadership in world affairs. And it would have worked too, if it weren't for those meddling kids (i.e. the Republicans in the U.S. Senate).

 

Wait a second, those Republicans are all wearing masks!

 

*Dramatic reveal*

 

It was really Britain, France, and (to a lesser extent) Italy that made all that go to waste! Come on, the League of Nations wouldn't have done anything more than reinforce the old habits through new means. I can't see it doing any good with Versailles still intact.

[snuffbox 0]

If that's what the textbook you use says about Harding, then it must be so.

[SuperJerk 0]

I forgot nobody knows as much as you about history, snuffbox. Certainly not the dozens of historians who've written books and articles about the failed policies of the 1920s or how well documented it is that Harding was able to implement very little before his death. Heaven forbid anyone could come to a conclusion different than what the one biography of Harding you read told you to think. The fact that he was only president for 2 years doesn't seem to deter your opinion that he was able to miraculously accomplish things that no one has ever actually credited him with. I mean, what the fuck do I know? I only have a B.S. in History with a 3.6 undergrad GPA. I must have pulled it from a high school text book.

 

Jackass.

 

 

It was really Britain, France, and (to a lesser extent) Italy that made all that go to waste! Come on, the League of Nations wouldn't have done anything more than reinforce the old habits through new means. I can't see it doing any good with Versailles still intact.

Well, this is all hypothetical, but many historians have suggested that America's absence from the League (due to the Senate's failure to ratify the Treaty of Versailles and join the League) was a major factor in its failure. I'm no Woodrow Wilson fan, either, but having the world's greatest emerging superpower from the organization might have caused the organization to have more of a backbone in the years leading up to WWII.

[Big Ol' Smitty 0]

How many times have you guys had this Harding fight?

[snuffbox 0]

You can read better than that, smitty. It does not appear that I am taking Y2Jerk, or his argument, into any serious consideration.

[SuperJerk 0]

Nevermind.

Edited February 19, 2009 by SuperJerk

[snuffbox 0]

And, how does Kennedy make the list at number 6? I know he's wildly popular and all, and I don't actively despise him like noted failures such as Wilson, but he really only showed one major stroke of great leadership during his abbreviated term. His handle on Congress was so tenuous that the Civil Rights legislation would have probably never been passed under his watch, the Bay of Pigs was awful but at the very least did better qualify him for the missile crisis, and, while he may have moved in a better direction had he not been murdered, played no small role in the creeping towards a disastrous adventure in Southeat Asia. I'm not convinced that the one shining moment during the missile crisis episode qualifies him as the 6th greatest presidential leader in our history.

 

Very popular man, though.

[At Home 0]

Yeah I'm not a big Kennedy fan either. Popular guy, but I blame Vietnam on him.

[snuffbox 0]

I don't see how he can be given any more blame than Eisenhower, who had already started the whole 'advisors' deal and first popularized the 'domino theory' (his VP, Nixon, and Secretary of State, JF Dulles, were in favor of American involvement in Vietnam as soon as the French fell). Johnson has to be given the most blame, as the decision to escalate the troop involvement while implementing a confused, dishonest and neutered military strategy were his own. Nixon also deserves some blame as he continued the war for more than a full presidential term before agreeing to the same terms he could have gotten during his first year in office. The decisions to widen the war into other countries was his own.

 

But, even without full blame (he has to be given some) Kennedy still can't be placed in the top dozen without taking his popularity into account. And what popularity has to do with leadership is beyond me.

[SuperJerk 0]

I'm gonna have to pretty much agree with snuffbox on JFK.

 

I think Kennedy gets extra credit with a lot of people for handling the Cuban Missile Crisis and pushing the moon landing.