Hoover. He need’s redemption and America is the land of second chances.
[SPOILER]Among the modern presidents, my actual list is Eisenhower, Bush Sr. and FDR. If we’re going further back, I nominate Jefferson and then T. Roosevelt.
Going back to non-serious choices, how about William Henry Harrison? I’m sure if given a second chance, he’d wear a coat and hat. Think about all his other potential improvements.[/SPOILER]
Duplicate.
1st choice would be Hoover. Bad rap as he inherited problems from “do nothing Coolidge”. Proposed ideas as a lame duck president hat FDR credit for. Humanitarian who also had a business sense on problem solving.
2nd pick would be Reagan. Able to work both sides for the betterment of the country.
3rd, Truman. I think he has a sign on his desk “the buck stops here”.
4th, Ike. Had the “power” to sway for what needed to be done.
Last place in modern history (my life time) Carter with a close second with LBJ.
Why would Hoover have been making proposals to Roosevelt? The depression began in 1929 and Hoover was President until 1933; if he had some good ideas, he had ample opportunity to use them during his own administration.
Hoover wasn’t incompetent. He had been a success in many things. If he had been lucky and had been President during normal times, he would have done a good job. But he was unlucky and was President during a major crisis that was beyond his capabilities. He tried applying small solutions to a big problem. And what was worse, he kept trying to apply those solutions long after he should have seen they weren’t working and tried something new.
From The American Historian Herbert Hoover- The Man Nobody Knows.
“Hoover embarked on the presidency with an agenda of reform before the stock market crash of October 1929. The nation slid into the most intractable depression in its history. As president, Hoover became the most activist chief executive during hard times up to that point in American history, the first to pit the government against the economic cycle. Many of his ideas became integral to the New Deal.”
“Hoover had planned to make world peace his greatest priority before the depression and his achievements were consequential. These included the Good Neighbor Policy with Latin America, often attributed to FDR and face-to-face summit diplomacy with foreign leaders.”
Grover Cleveland, for a third non-consecutive term!
Reagan or Coolidge.
I don’t think anything could be worse than what we have.
I’m surprising myself with this answer, but Reagan.
Under Obama, right-wingers would do the exact opposite of whatever he advised, just because.
I think Reagan was smart enough that he would advocate for the proper safety measures, and people from all across the political spectrum would actually do it.
I’d want to be serving anyone but Herbert Hoover.
He was a legendarily bad tipper.
Eisenhower
FDR
Bush Sr.
Personally I would love Obama, but he is so disliked by ⅓ of the country that he wouldn’t make a good leader in a crisis. That is unfortunate but in a crisis it has to be considered.
Maybe seeing a POTUS die from the illness (assuming he passes from Covid-19 this time around) could convince people to follow the expert’s recommendations.
QFT
President Liz Warren.
That doesn’t address the question I asked. If Hoover had all of the ideas of the New Deal, why didn’t he enact the New Deal? Why did he wait until Roosevelt won the 1932 election and then pass his ideas on to Roosevelt?
My answer is: he didn’t really have those ideas. Hoover had some thoughts about the government intervening in the economy but he felt such intervention was inherently a bad idea so he did as little of it as possible. And this minimalist approach didn’t work.
Roosevelt came at it from the opposite direction; he tried everything, based on the principle that some of what he was doing would work and he could always stop doing the things that weren’t working. It was the maximalist approach.
Hoover often used the metaphor of the economy being like a sick person. And he said that what the economy needed was some time to rest in order to recover from its illness and get back to good health. At most, he might offer the economy an aspirin so it would be a little more comfortable while it was healing itself.
To follow along with this metaphor, Roosevelt said the economy needed surgery. The depression was not the equivalent of a flu; it was the equivalent of a bad appendix. The economy was not going to fix itself. The government needed to take action to fix it.
There wasn’t much the Allies could do about it. Russia had more troops in Europe than they.
Truman’s apocryphal about Stalin could have been made by FDR. "I think he is a son of a bitch, but then so am I. OP: I’d go for FDR.
Obama
FDR. Before my time but he pulled the country together so we were all rowing in the same direction.
Today I followed a link to an Atlantic article about Eisenhower and Earl Warren. I’m not sure Ike would be the right guy for Black Lives Matter. (“These are not bad people. All they are concerned about is to see that their sweet little girls are not required to sit in school alongside some big black bucks.”)
I’ll go with Clinton. Maybe H.W. Bush.
I am going for someone who could out-BS the current Administration: Jack Nicholson in Mars Attacks!
OK, he is fictional, but hey… wouldn’t that be interesting to behold?