He inherited a shitty situation, and took long enough to get his bearings that the effective responses he came up with (Volcker, but also deregulation of the airline and trucking industries) didn’t see fruition until after his term was over. Camp David was a big deal - what president since has brokered a Middle East peace deal that’s actually held? And, to coin a phrase, He Kept Us Out Of War, which is a low bar to pass, but one that in the latter half of the 20th century only Ford and Carter actually DID pass.
Which is not to say Carter was a great president. But hey, Washington didn’t burn down during his administration, either.
I still think Arthur was less stellar than either Carter or Madison, but I’m more inclined to keep the Federalist tri-author and “Father of the Constitution” than one of the two ex-Georgia governors (Lester Maddox being the other) who sought the presidency in 1976.
13 votes so far; voting closes at 8:39 AM (central time) Thursday unless we have fewer than 20 votes, in which case it closes with the 20th vote or at 8:39 AM Saturday.
In case of a tie (which seems possible) I propose that voting be held open for one more vote among the tied contenders, and that changed votes be allowed for this purpose.
You may want to rethink that one. Taylor, neophyte that he was, had a political plan to cut off the slave vote in the Senate and strangle that peculiar institution into nonexistence. The southern states’ leadership threatened to secede; Taylor promised to hunt them down and kill them if they did, and he carried the military gravitas to back it up. I’m not a specialist in US history, but my decidedly amateurish opinion is that the Civil War wouldn’t have happened if Taylor had lived. I don’t feel he’s one of the weaker links in the history of the presidency.
And we have a 3-way tie between Carter, Madison, and Grant. Sorry if I gave the impression earlier that we were in a tie already; I just meant that we were in the “5 days or 20 votes” part of the round.
In any case, anyone who hasn’t voted for one of the current leaders want to break the tie? I’d accept a shift from one of the three onto another, as well.