There are a set of presidents that were just the wrong man for the job at the time or the decks were stacked against them. They might have been completely average presidents had History handed them different problems to solve. Johnson may be one of them. Hoover. Carter.
There are other presidents who got lucky with their eras - they governed in periods of mostly peace and prosperity. Recent examples are (IMHO) Clinton and Reagan - I think both probably have better reputations than they really deserved, simply because they got to govern during pretty good times (and maybe had they faced crisis, they’d have been great presidents).
If you were to take out the specific references to Katrina, Afghanistan and Iraq and just say “Disaster X,” “Country 1” and “Country 2” I would have no idea what President you were referring to.
I think Clinton made it look easy. We don’t remember crises because he averted them. Mexico’s 1994 financial meltdown could have been much worse (so bad Americans would have heard of it! and it would have affected our economy!) had Clinton’s administration not been pro-active. The 2000 terrorist plot, and several plots against the WTC, were also thwarted.
But the problem is that averting a crisis doesn’t stick in people’s memory the way responding correctly at the last minute does.
I also remember when all the conservative pundits were saying a new war in Korea was about to break out because Clinton wouldn’t be able to stop it from happening. And then he did.
People also forget that Clinton took office only about a year after the Soviet Union broke up. I give Bush credit for navigating through the fall of communism in Europe but there was still a lot of potential for problems in the post-Soviet world that Clinton had to deal with.
I have to give Bush II credit and criticism for the same decision. Stem cells. Allowing research when your own party opposes it is brave. The he shot himself in the foot by restricting it to existing lines, even though in his book you get the impression he would have dearly loved to allow full funding, and he had personal reasons, his sister died of leukemia, something which has affected him throughout his life. It was a difficult decision and one on which legacies are made and he blew it. Which is surprising as he has never been shy of making difficult decisions something I wish Obama would copy.
Clinton had challenges no doubt, but these were small and the major risks from the post Soviet era had been faced and dealt with by the senior Bush. The Mexico issue in 1994 was deftly handled but he credit there really belongs to the international institutions. Korea was a case of saber rattling a new war was alwAys unlikely
Clinton was perhaps the ablest man to hold the presidency since Nixon and if he had faced a major challenge I think he would have done well
The blood of every soldier who has died in Iraq is on the hands of GWB. He knowingly invaded under false pretenses, and the same as put a gun to the heads of every one of them and pulled the trigger.
When another President is personally responsible for murdering over 3,000 American troops, I’ll move him up to #1.
Reagan is a close second for selling weapons to Saddam AND Al Qaeda, and setting the stage for the current economic collapse.
Not to mention that blaming anybody for passage of bills such as the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which granted black Americans such “outrageous” rights as the right to own property and testify in court, is perverse in the extreme.
Of course, for an opposing point of view, we can always quote Andrew Johnson’s courageous veto message of the same:
Oh, well, no wonder then. We can’t let ourselves be overrun by gipsies.
Goddamn. When we do these in the future can we stop at Pres Johnson or Nixon so they don’t devolve into a “Who was more evil: Reagan or GW Bush?” thread and get some good historical discussion?
It’s not like we haven’t had a plethora of other threads calling for Bush to be tried for war crimes.
Not that I disagree with the purpose of that Act, but pre-14th amendment, that was an extreme usurpation of federal power. Congress had no authority at that time to enact a law in an area that was purely the domain of the states.
It took the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause to force states to recognize those rights and let Congress enforce them. To do so with a law was unheard of in U.S. History, put a boot to the throats of the Southern states when Johnson (and earlier Lincoln) wanted to bring them back with minimal conditions.
While selling arms to Iraq might have been a mistake, these sales didn’t amount to more than $200 million in helicopters and some arrangements for arms sales from other countries. This really isn’t much. The Iran-Contra affair was a much bigger deal.
And since al-Qaeda didn’t fully evolve from the predecessor Maktab al-Khidamat until after Reagan’s term, and the impetus behind this change was the desire of bin Laden to move jihad from Afghanistan to the West - you are wrong there.
There are probably lots of good reasons not to like Reagan. You picked a couple that don’t add up.
I vote for Woodrow Wilson. His decision to get the US involved in WW1 was a huge mistake for the entire world. As others have pointed out, he also set back the Civil Rights movement.
Reagan would be my second choice for all the reasons BobLibDem cited.
Andrew Johnson would be my third. His policies and attitudes ensured Reconstruction would be a miserable failure. jtgain, if you don’t believe this, read Erik Foner’s Reconstruction and get back to me.
Why not pick LBJ (or JFK, or RMN) for sending thousands of U.S. servicemen to their deaths (and killing thousands more Vietnamese) in a pointless war? At least under Bush you had to volunteer for duty with the armed forces.