U.S. Presidents - Cold War and New Millennium Edition

though I dunno I'd probably put nixon in the upper half of this list?

Ike and LBJ:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SlKu9t9Q9x8

If you hate Reagan that much, why so fond of Nixon?

cause he wasn't as damaging to the country as he was to the republicans (or as many of these people)

I suppose Reagan is the equivalent of Thatcher, tho no-one near as awful

I dunno – under Nixon we lost another 20,000 soldiers in Vietnam, more in Cambodia, and the gutting of the Justice Dept and FBI.

outside of letting "one nation 'under God'" slip in, I have very few problems with Eisenhower. probably the most 'decent' dude on this list outside of Carter maybe.

eh carter is 'decent' in the same way many religious leaders are

Carter has always seemed petty and mean in person, esp. when as president

huh. i'm admittedly pretty ignorant about him.

xpost, gotcha

like, honestly does care about poor people, I'm sure, but mentally stubborn and stuck in his ways to the extent that it doesn't and didn't really matter how much he 'cares'

okay so like I said, take these guys outside of history and just look at them purely on their decision making philosophy and abilities. how many of these guys would have made the right decisions in vietnam? I dunno.

who would you want in charge of a relatively easy and prosperous decade? some sort of 1950s/1990s hybrid.

who would you want in charge during the opposite? 9/11 + the current recession, let's say.

who would you want in charge of a relatively easy and prosperous decade? some sort of 1950s/1990s hybrid.
- lbj

who would you want in charge during the opposite? 9/11 + the current recession, let's say.
- clinton maybe

xpost. I'm influenced by Rick Perlstein's reading that Nixon introduced cancerous tendencies into US politics - the politics of resentment - and set about demonising and sabotaging his opponents like nobody before him (or at least nobody 20C) so I blame him for a lot of the bullshit conservative talking points that we still have to put up with. And his one big achievement, China, he largely owed to Kissinger.

Also the argument that he sabotaged the Paris peace talks in order to win in 68 and thus cost the US its best (though by no means guaranteed) chance to end the war early.

Harry S. Truman - I understand the ambivalence but he gets very high marks from me for not fucking up at one of the most important and decisive points in modern history. Also, going out on a limb alone and integrating the military is the beginning of the modern civil rights era and it won him almost nothing.

Lyndon B. Johnson - Dramatically failed presidency that also brought us, largely through his own scrotum crushing coarseness, Civil Rights bill, Medicare, etc...

Ronald Reagan - Whatever else can be said of the man (whom I always loathed), he was instrumental in ending the Cold War.

Dwight D. Eisenhower - A man of great decency

George H.W. Bush - The last "conservative" who had a somewhat sane view on the economy. His respect for and restraint wrt to UN mandate in Iraq always made me salute him.

John F. Kennedy - At the end of the day, his legacy is mostly Cuban Missile crisis and being an inspiration.

Jimmy Carter - Taught me back in the 70's to turn the light out when I left a room. An immensely decent man imho.

Bill Clinton - I'm not terribly fond of him or his legacy but he's not the worst.

Richard M. Nixon - Tricky Dick was always just that. I cannot think of many nice things to say about him and his affect on American politics has been largely disastrous.

George W. Bush - A shoot from the hip kind of guy who shot his own foot. From the perspective of his own stated goals or objectively, one of the most spectacularly failed presidents of the modern era.

Gerald R. Ford - This isn't a rating of Gerry; I'm just not rating him. When I was a child, he was just the butt of jokes about his clumsiness. He wasn't elected, did little in office and was an essentially decent man even if he didn't know shit about Poland.

ha i'm woefully ignorant of a lot of this... i was gonna suggest a parallel poll of house speakers for the same time period but i know even less about them

Pelosi by a huge, undisputed lead over Hastert, Gingrich, Wright, O'Neill, etc.

Also the argument that he sabotaged the Paris peace talks in order to win in 68 and thus cost the US its best (though by no means guaranteed) chance to end the war early.

I was hoping someone would allude to this – maybe the most barbaric action by a president this century. "Cynical" is too kind.

I guess the thing I see in my list is that Nixon and Shrub pandered so much to their constituencies that they lost control of them. They didn't lead much at all. Clinton is marginally better. Reagan, at least, mostly had the balls to do his thing and seduced a lot of Americans into thinking it was cool.

iatee is right about reagan's awful, awful economics (and as i mentioned somewhere else once, his administration's attitude toward civil liberties/surveillance state stuff is where bush and cheney took their cues), which has to be weighed against his relatively sane foreign policy.

the otherwise benign ford gets a low rating from me for pardoning nixon -- even though it's next to impossible to imagine any judge sending nixon to prison, would've been a pretty strong symbolic victory for the constitution and the rule of law if nothing else.

i guess i'd rate them like this:

eisenhower
carter
LBJ
clinton
JFK
bush I
reagan
ford
truman
nixon
bush II

Maybe it's a sign of my age, but I cannot think less of any major American politician w/as much scorn as I do of Nixon. He was a weasally evil man and he has just caused me to calumniate weasels.

Reagan, at least, mostly had the balls to do his thing and seduced a lot of Americans into thinking it was cool.

I don't consider this a virtue when the thing is a very bad thing!

it's weird I have an almost fondness for nixon, maybe because he's seriously the only person on this list who actually had to suffer for his sins

not in the hell sense, I mean clearly they're all going there

why do you rate Carter so high, J.D.?

(by the way I'm polling early 20th century prez'nits next)

I don't consider this a virtue when the thing is a very bad thing!

The only 'virtue' here is that at least he was more a leader than a panderer.

Pelosi by a huge, undisputed lead over Hastert, Gingrich, Wright, O'Neill, etc.

OTFM I am so proud of Nancy

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3579/3823648109_ae39805082_o.jpg

l-r

america, reagan

http://underwhelmedcomic.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/newnixon2.jpg

I mean this is very similar logic to why many people voted bush over kerry! I'm fine w/ a panderer, hell, that should probably be in the job description.

panderer to the american people

x-post: yeah, the thing is that (understandably enough) historians tend to rate presidents based on how "effective" they are, so they rate someone like james k. polk highly regardless of what one might think of polk's imperialism, etc. on the other hand, when it comes to domestic stuff presidential effectiveness depends largely on how willing congress is to work with them -- congress caved in to reagan repeatedly, whereas they were tough on clinton.

alfred: i'd never argue that carter was anything special as a leader, but judging him against these other characters, he seemed like the 'least bad' option. for all his incompetence, i sometimes wonder what his legacy would've been if the hostages had been released a little earlier in 1980 and allowed him to squeak through; i think we tend to automatically see one-term presidents as "failures" and two-termers as "successes" regardless of what they actually did. (surely the same thing would have happened to reagan if he'd been kicked out in 1984.) speaking of one-termers, i was actually tempted to rate bush I higher, since i can't think of any specific reason not to, but tbh i'm probably less informed on the nuts and bolts of his administration than any of these guys so i just left him in the middle.

first Gulf War basically gave us Gulf War II so he can fuck right off imho

"he tried to kill my dad!" etc

Polk's considered the most effective one-term president of all.

yeah, it's often forgotten that until the week before the election Reagan and Carter were neck and neck. It might've sprung the other way had the hostages been released. Not to mention considerable evidence suggests that Bill Casey, Richard Allen, and Poppy Bush reached a deal with the Iranians to refrain from releasing them until after the inauguration, in exchange for weapons.

Morbs likes Bush I best, right? I can't think of another president w ho did less an office. Let's see what I remember: Bush holding up a bag of cocaine warning kids to stay away, he hated broccoli, signed the American Disabilities Act, hated by George Will and religio-cons, first Gulf War, raised taxes, and, uh, what else?

puking in Japan

*who did less in office

puking in Japan

Graham Parker?

feud with homer simpson

^^literally the first thing that came to mind

at the very least, he's the worst parent on the list

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWJHCRVs4AY

Doh! I should've voted JFK.

He was a weasally evil man and he has just caused me to calumniate weasels.

I've read and thought about Nixon a fair amount. One of the most perceptive things I've heard anybody say about him was something from Carl Bernstein (around the time of Mark Felt's coming out, I think): that of anyone who was ever president, Nixon was in a universe all his own as far as being the most temperamentally unsuited person ever to hold the job, and that instead of beginning each day by saying "What problem should we focus on today?", he would literally begin by saying "What score can I settle today?" But--and here's where my fascination comes in--there was also this deeply sentimental side to him (inexorably bound up with his endless self-pity) that would see him call up some reporter after 25 years to express sympathy over the death of his wife.

yeah it's sorta astounding that the most powerful human being on the planet could still have that big a chip on his shoulder.

Dubya had even bigger chips

at least Nixon didn't just bomb cambodia cuz he hated his dad, knowhutimean

Ike is probably the least hate-able, would have voted for "Fuck The Lot Of Them."

Carter's probably the most frustrating, for the way 'progressives' have whitewashed his foreign policy - just as brutal and inhumane as Reagan was.

huh? nobody likes carter

"if it was fave person i would vote carter though <3"
"probably the most 'decent' dude on this list outside of Carter maybe."
"An immensely decent man imho."
"i'd never argue that carter was anything special as a leader, but judging him against these other characters, he seemed like the 'least bad' option."

That's just in this thread!