Jefferson gets into the top 10 for the Louisiana Purchase alone. More than any other President he literally shaped our nation borders, and he did it on the extreme cheap.
Reagan is absolutely overrated. Not that I think he was a bad President, but he’s getting Mount Rushmore levels of ass-kissing right now and he merits little of it.
JFK is certainly overrated, and brought us closer to nuclear war than any President before or since. That said, if we credit him for what his death helped to accomplish he goes way, way up. The Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act might never had been passed without it.
Eisenhower deserves a lot of credit, but he seems to get a lot of credit. I don’t see how he’s underrated.
Ford has always appealed to me as a conservative Christian who made a point of keeping his faith out of his office and out of the public eye. Would that all Presidents realize that their faith in Jesus is none of our business, and that our faith or lack thereof is none of theirs.
Overrated: Obama. No, it’s not too early to say. Before the election, his supporters and the media talked about him like he was the second coming of Christ. By now, it’s become clear that he’s just average, maybe a bit below average. His biggest flaws are that he refuses to give anything more than lip-service to bipartisanship (witness yesterday’s healthcare meeting: “I’ll consider any Republican ideas, as long as they fit in with my plans.”) and that he’s a fairly weak leader who appears to cowtow to forein interests.
I think it is too early to say, because he’s still in office. It doesn’t really matter what kind of president people thought he might be. It matters what kind of president he was, and history’s yet to decide that. Though I will agree he has demonstrated a disappointing lack of leadership. I’m fed up with our whole damn petty partisan corporate-interest driven government, but that’s another thread.
In my estimation the two most overrated presidents are Woodrow Wilson and William Jefferson Clinton. Woodrow Wilson was a racist, imperialist ass.
I dig what Clinton’s doing now on an international level, but his administration implemented social welfare policy and trade policy which only exacerbated the problems of poverty and immigration. As a matter of fact, when I look at his work, I can’t even believe fiscal conservatives hate him as much as they do. You’d think he was working for them.
Are you serious? Faced with an opposition that won’t even pay lip service to bipartisanship, I’m a little frustrated that he’s even agreeing to consider any Republican ideas.
To agree with what others have already said, I have never heard any liberals praise Carter as a “great President,” and my circles include a fair representation of the left and far left. Where do you get this from?
As to the OP, my personal nomination for most overrated president is easily Ronald Reagan. As for underrated, at least in my lifetime, I think George H.W. Bush should be looked on more favorably.
Well, he just said “praised by some liberals”, not “praised by some liberals as a great President”, so maybe it just irks him that somebody once said something nice about Carter.
I have to say that George W Bush is underrated. Not because he was a good president; he was a terrible one. The Iraq War was completely unnecessary and unjustified. But he doesn’t match up to the demonic image that many liberals assign to him. Bush wasn’t a dictator who planned to declare marshal law or cancel the elections or anything like that. Frankly, I think that by the time his second term ended, he hated being president and couldn’t wait to get out of office. (If you want to know what a real dictator looks like, look at Venezuela. Hugo Chavez has shut down opposition-run media, confiscated huge segments of the economy, and arrests opposition politicians in order to intimidate them. And he pushed though an ammendment to remove term limits, so he can potentially be president-for-life. That’s a dictator. But I digress.)
I also say that Kennedy is overrated. The guy damn-near started a nuclear war, and he escalated the Vietman war.
Wherever you rated Geo. Bush, you have overrated him. Imagine, in eight years, he
turned a large budget surplus into a giant deficit
started two unwinnable wars
gave Iran a large influence in Iraq and encouraged them to go nuclear
turned the US from the home of the brave and land of the free into the home of the cowed and the land of the highly controlled.
A propos that last point, when I was growing up, it was pointed out that no Soviet citizen could travel without and “internal passport”, a state that has largely come about in the US. The last time I took a train, inspectors were opening luggage of passengers boarding and were, in turn, watched by a man in uniform and carrying a sub-machine gun. Yes, if we stop all this, there might be a few additional deaths, but if we lowered the speed limit to 55 we would save a lot more. I could go on, but I stop.
I agree Carter is overrated and I am not sure of Kennedy. I think Reagan is largely overrated. He was the first of the really big peascetime deficit presidents. I think Harding was underrated. An amiable non-entity, doubtless, but he gave us no wars, no depressions and only one bad scandal. I wish I could decide on Wilson.
Somebody mentioned Adams. He gave us the alien and sedition acts. So I am not too sure about him. Jefferson gave us Louisiana, a gigantic contribution. I know about his personal flaws, but he was a great president.
I don’t think that Ford’s Christianity was conservative. I know that Reagan’s Christianity was not conservative, he and Nancy were mainstream Presbyterians. I think that upbringing probably turned Ron Jr. and Patty into the liberals they are today. That must drive their mother nuts! Nancy was adamant that they not associate with liberals as they grew up. But Presbyterianism takes all that stuff about created equally and just application of laws seriously enough to teach it in Sunday school. I remember it.
I think Clinton will be remembered as a highly competent president, but without a great crisis, or some Louisiana Purchase type accomplishment, he wont’ be remembered as a great president. Had his health plan passed, that would have been the accomplishment.
This is the same reason I tend to rate Bush41 higher than most folks I know. It is still a bit soon, but the man put together an international coalition to handle the Kuwait invasion, then stopped the fighting when the goals were reached. And he also had the guts to raise taxes when they needed to be, to pay for the war and what Reagan had done to the Federal budget, despite knowing it would hurt him in his re-election bid. Part of the long expansion we had under Clinton was because the man bit the bullet and did the unthinkable, broke a campaign promise. I think he has been the only real conservative President we have had in the last 30 years.
I have been both amused and disgusted by the neo-cons, who keep saying that we won’t be able to fairly judge Bush43 until 50 years have passed, it is too soon, but Obama has failed completely as a President at less than a year in office. I would rather have 4 decades of the “failure” of Obama over the kinds of “success” that Bush43 had in any 1 of his years in office.
And I agree with Hari Seldon, I remember hearing how horrible it was in the Soviet Union, needing internal passports. But now here we “need” a national ID card, so we can prove who we are. :dubious:
So one guy, on the Straight Dope, ranks him 12th, and he’s overrated? Come now. He’s not rated at all as a positive president by most anyone in real life.
No, not best. But I do think he is underrated, because he ended up being a 1 term President between 2 very popular 2 term Presidents. If he had won a second term, I think he would have done a good job. And maybe he could have erased some of the Ronnie worship that is so prevalent today by showing what a moderate conservative could do.
The Americans were overall treated Cuba and the Phillippines better than the Spanish (plus if we hadn’t gotten the Phillippines Japan would probably have seized it) plus Puerto Rico, Guam, and several other islands became part of America. Shame we didn’t annex Cuba-probably would be one of the Sun Belt states to-day.
Kennedy and Reagan: Popular due to their personal charisma but neither actually did all that much. They both often are credited for things they didn’t really do. (Obama could end up in this group if he doesn’t start moving.)
Jefferson: Talked a good talk but frequently failed to live up to his avowed principles.
Wilson: His two main goals were keeping us out of WWI and getting us into the League of Nations - and he failed at both due to his own flaws. Plus a major racist even by the standards of his times.
Underrated:
Ford: Kept things under control several times during what could have been major crises.
Carter: Not a great President by any means but hardly the complete disaster many claim.
Lyndon Johnson: His major failings in Vietnam overshadowed some genuine accomplishments in Civil Rights.
John Adams: A hugely important figure in founding the country but his reputation suffers because he wasn’t as iconic as Washington, Jefferson, or Franklin. His bad ideas have been fixed but his good ideas endure.
It’s not an issue of whether the Spanish, the Americans, or the Japanese would have made the best colonial overlords. The people who should have been running Cuba and the Philipines were Cubans and Filipinos.