# Who was the stupidest US president? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\ **Created:** [May 27, 2015, 6:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968 "2015-05-27T18:03:35Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 12\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2015, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/61 "2015-06-15T12:16:59Z")
Oh, come on, astorian. George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Dan Quayle, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (to include Vice-Presidential candidates) are at least as much aristocrats as the Democrats you list. I think that there’s a good case that both parties have too many candidates for most national offices from upper-middle-class to outright rich families. It would be a good idea if they both quit doing that. Claiming that only one party does it is another case of “I will notice all the faults of the other party but ignore those of my own.” ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2015, 1:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/62 "2015-06-15T13:48:22Z")
If by “stupid” you mean: -unwillingness to face facts -blind to evidence -disinclined to accept advice from experts -unconcerned with the results of his actions I would have to say Lyndon Johnson. Despite all advice, he (eagerly) jumped into Vietnam. Despite being told that such a war would last years (if not decades) and bankrupt America (his sec. of the treasury , Henry Fowler, told him that financing the war without massive taxes would lead to inflation), he was ready to send every armed force he could mobilize). Then, when the disaster became known, he cowardly declined to run again, leaving the mess for his successors. He was a bully, a foul mouthed jerk, who thought he could force his will on North Vietnam. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2015, 4:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/63 "2015-06-15T16:46:59Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > I still haven’t seen any evidence of Al Gore’s allegedly stellar intelligence. Maybe you could share some facts you possess that I don’t. The fact that Gore had it more right than wrong in the issue of global warming should be enough, as it is the fact that with Bush the Republicans found more justifications to ignore the science. Heck, [Bush even made efforts to keep the NASA scientists quiet about the issue.](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/6341451/ns/us_news-environment/t/nasa-scientist-rips-bush-global-warming/) > **[The worst of times: Bush's environmental legacy examined](https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2009/jan/16/greenpolitics-georgebush)** > > Bush's departure from the White House will not be lamented by anyone who cares about the environment – or science > [@](#): > > “If only” – went the near-universal response from green organisations. They see the Bush years as a concerted assault, from the administration’s undermining of the science on climate change to its dismantling of environmental safeguards to its support for mining and oil interests. > > “He has undone decades if not a century of progress on the environment,” said Josh Dorner, a spokesman for the Sierra Club, one of America’s largest environmental groups. > > “The Bush administration has introduced this pervasive rot into the federal government which has undermined the rule of law, undermined science, undermined basic competence and rendered government agencies unable to do their most basic function even if they wanted to. We’re excited just to push the reset button.” > > The tone was set in the first 100 days when Bush reneged on a campaign promise to regulate carbon dioxide from coal-burning power plants, the biggest contributors to global warming. Days later, the White House announced that America would not implement the Kyoto global climate change treaty. > > The two moves at the time were seen as a sign of surrender from Bush, a former oil man, to America’s coal and oil industries. > [@astorian](#): > > But my focus was not solely on Al Gore, but on a general trend. Gerald Ford got into Yale Law School on his own merits and did extremely well. And yet he was invariably portrayed as a dunce while he was President. AFTER he left office, and regularly took potshots at more conservative Republicans, he earned a Strange New Respect on the Left. > > Ford’s academic record trounces Adlai Stevenson’s (Ford graduated in the top quarter of an elite law school, while Stevenson flunked out of law school), but which man was always portrayed as cerebral and which was portrayed as a bumbling, dumb ex-jock? > > It’s almost a given that the media will treat ANY leading Democrat as an intellectual and any Republican as a dope. In the end it is what you do with that intelligence what counts. The current Republicans using that intelligence to find ways to ignore science is just as good as not having good intelligence. As I pointed before, a former staffer of Bush claimed as a teacher now at a big university that Bush was really a genius and was aware of everything. The problem with that is that the right is welcomed to prop up guys like Bush, because it leads to the realization that Bush did know about how fake the reasons to invade were in Iraq. The more the right talks about the alleged intelligence of guys like Bush gives us a big reason to write for history and posterity (and I’m becoming an historian BTW) that Bush the lesser was indeed a rat bastard. Really, for all the ones that supported him it is better to continue to claim that he was just an incompetent that forgot what he learned thanks to drugs and alcohol. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [June 15, 2015, 4:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/64 "2015-06-15T16:49:48Z")
> [@astorian](#): > > Bottom line is, nearly every Republican politician is treated as (at best) an affable dolt, regardless of his accomplishments or educational background. And every Democrat this side of Joe Biden is treated as an intellectual, whether he deserves it or not. > > Folks, Al Gore WAS George W. Bush. They were pretty much the same guy: sons of prominent politicians, dim rich kids from very prominent families, spoiled pampered kids who got mediocre grades in school and got where they got almost solely through family connections. But Dubya was always portrayed as a moron and Gore as a brainiac. > > Adlai Stevenson was ALSO s spoiled rich kid from a prominent family. He was an apathetic student who got into Princeton and Harvard Law School (where he flunked out) through family connections. He never said or did anything to suggest he was a genius, but he was always treated as such- unlike his GOP rival Dwight Eisenhower, who was always portrayed as a grinning dunce. > > Ted Cruz, like Barack Obama, was editor of the Harvard Law Review. He’s at LEAST as intelligent as the President. But watch the way he’s treated in interviews, and ask yourself if any reporter would try to embarrass Obama the same way. I don’t think Cruz has a chance of winning the GOP nomination, but if he is? Make no mistake, he will be portrayed as a retard by the Jon Stewarts and Stephen Cole-burts. The main problem with this argument is its consistency, a sentence I never thought I’d write. You take it back too far. Who were the the “they” who thought Stevenson was an egghead and Eisenhower a dunce? I assume you have to mean the media, which in those days was newspapers. In the 1950s, though, newspapers were overwhelmingly conservative; i.e. Republican everywhere outside the South. There has been a running argument for decades whether reporters - who do tend to be liberal, if not necessarily party affiliated - are more important in shaping public impressions or the publishers and editors who don’t merely control the editorial pages - against overwhelming Republican in that era - but shape the thrust of the news are. AFAIK, the common people decided that Stevenson was an egghead while Eisenhower was grandpa, possibly [Foxy Grandpa](http://www.comicvine.com/foxy-grandpa/4005-78471/). And you conveniently leave out examples that contradict your case. Before they took office, FDR was a second-rate mind, a dilettante, a weakling, yet Hoover was the best mind of his generation, a force of nature who got impossible things done. Truman was a Missouri machine thug. Kennedy has been mentioned here as intelligent, but I don’t know by whom: Washington considered his father the power and him a playboy. Johnson was nothing better than a crude shitkicker. Carter’s intelligence was acknowledged and then ridiculed as ineffective. The quotes that come out of peoples’ mouths do shape opinion on their intelligence. Kennedy had the best writers and sounded terrific. Stevenson had verbal wit. Eisenhower talked such mush that a [parody of him writing the Gettysburg Address](https://powellhistory.wordpress.com/2008/03/24/if-eisenhower-had-given-the-gettysburg-address/) in gobbledegook was an instant winner. (BTW, The author, Oliver Jensen, was a founder and later editor of _American Heritage_, which always had a conservative bent toward history.) Today, the Republican candidates say stupid things. They do so repeatedly. They get quoted and the quotes disseminated more easily than ever before. Of course a constituency exists that eagerly pounces on these quotes. Yet a similar, and perhaps louder, constituency appears on the right waiting to pounce on Democrats. Despite this, their collection of quotes is mockably small by comparison. I can’t explain this except with the conclusion that Republican candidates do say things that serve to make them seem stupid with remarkable frequency. ---
**Author:** ![John\_W.Kennedy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_w.kennedy/32/1031_2.png) [@John\_W.Kennedy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_W.Kennedy)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2015, 12:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/65 "2015-06-16T00:58:28Z")
In any case, there is no sense treating the two parties as the same thing both before and after Barry Goldwater’s 1964 decision to make the Republican Party the official party of the Ku Klux Klan. There have been a number of times in US history when the parties have remixed, and that was one of the biggest. (The founding of the Tea Party may well prove to have been another.) ---
**Author:** ![Deeg](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/deeg/32/2955_2.png) [@Deeg](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Deeg)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2015, 2:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/66 "2015-06-16T02:39:07Z")
> [@GIGObuster](#): > > The fact that Gore had it more right than wrong in the issue of global warming should be enough, as it is the fact that with Bush the Republicans found more justifications to ignore the science. In no way is a single topic justification for Al Gore’s intelligence, especially when the topic happens to line up with his political persuasion. ---
**Author:** ![GIGObuster](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gigobuster/32/421_2.png) [@GIGObuster](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GIGObuster)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2015, 2:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/67 "2015-06-16T02:52:45Z")
> [@Deeg](#): > > In no way is a single topic justification for Al Gore’s intelligence, especially when the topic happens to line up with his political persuasion. Of course not, but it was to reply to someone that claimed that there was **no** justification or evidence whatsoever of more intelligence than the one Bush had. And besides Iraq it also demonstrates the uncuriosity of Bush the lesser. ---
**Author:** ![Irishman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/b487fb/32.png) [@Irishman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Irishman)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2015, 3:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/68 "2015-06-16T03:11:05Z")
> [@Wendell\_Wagner](#): > > Oh, come on, astorian. George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, Dan Quayle, and Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr. (to include Vice-Presidential candidates) are at least as much aristocrats as the Democrats you list. [snip] Claiming that only one party does it is another case of “I will notice all the faults of the other party but ignore those of my own.” I don’t believe he claimed the Repubs don’t do it. What he was contrasting was the idea of Dems claiming to be the party of the people, of the working class, and their slate of politicians that are all rich. Whereas the the Repubs are thought of as the party of big business and the rich, so there’s no contradiction in candidates being rich. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2015, 7:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/69 "2015-06-16T07:14:02Z")
It would be interesting then for the Republicans to explicitly call themselves the party of the rich. In any case, the Republicans still more consistently run candidates who were born rich or ones from several generations of a “dynasty” of some sort. Here’s the Presidential and Vice-Presidential candidates: > **[List of United States presidential candidates](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_candidates)** > > This article is a list of United States presidential candidates. The first U.S. presidential election was held in 1788–1789, followed by the second in 1792. Presidential elections have been held every four years thereafter. > Presidential candidates win the election by winning a majority of the electoral vote. If no candidate wins a majority of the electoral vote, the winner is determined through a contingent election held in the United States House of Representatives; this situation has occurred... Now nobody since 1980 has been remotely from a poor family, but contrast the background of the Democratic candidates with those of the Republican ones since 1980: In six of the nine elections, one person on the Republican ticket was a member of the Bush family. Look at the male line. The most recent three became a senator, a president, and a president. Four of the past five most recent Bushes in that line were Yale graduates (James Smith Bush, Prescott Bush, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush but not Samuel Prescott Bush). (Barbara Bush, daughter of George W. Bush, is also a Yale graduate and Dick Cheney flunked out of Yale.) All five in the male line were somewhere between well off and outright rich. Mitt Romney was part of a political and business dynasty, since his father was also a governor and president of a large company. Dan Quayle’s father and grandfather were rich newspaper owners. John McCain’s father and grandfather were four-star admirals. So at least one of the Republican candidates on the ticket in eight of the past nine elections were from a political, military, or business dynasty. One of the Democrats on the ticket in those nine elections was part of a political dynasty, since Al Gore’s father was a senator. John Kerry’s father was a diplomat and some of the members in his extended family were rich, although his parents weren’t rich. Those are the only ones that perhaps are part of a dynasty, so maybe four of the past nine elections had a Democrat from something that might be thought of as a dynasty on the ticket. None of the Republican or Democratic candidates came from a poor family. The closest might be John Edwards, Democratic Vice-Presidential candidate in 2004, whose father was a supervisor at a lumber mill. On the average, the Republican candidates on the national ticket were clearly more part of dynasties than the Democratic ones, but neither party has done a good job of choosing people born in poorer circumstances. ---
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2015, 10:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/70 "2015-06-16T22:52:26Z")
Paul Ryan lived on Social Security for several years when he was a teenager. Sarah Palin’s father was a high school coach and teacher and her mother was a school secretary. Cheney’s father was an Agriculture Department agent. Joe Biden’s family was very poor early, but they became middle class as his father’s work improved. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2015, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/71 "2015-06-17T00:35:48Z")
To be exact, Paul Ryan’s father was a lawyer. So the family was middle-class until he died when Paul was 16. Then he scraped by for a few years until he was 22 and got a middle-class job. Ryan, Cheney, Palin, and Biden mostly grew up in middle-class circumstances. ---
**Author:** ![adaher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/dec6dc/32.png) [@adaher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/adaher)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2015, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968/72 "2015-06-17T02:30:31Z")
But Biden was also the poorest Senator. He never used his position to cash in as many sitting Senators have done. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/who-was-the-stupidest-us-president/720968.md?page=3)