who was america's best president?

Also, cross-reference

Lincoln? FDR?

xpost

http://worldroots.com/brigitte/gifs4/williamharrison.gif

LBJ did that, too! Well, pretty much.

FDR didn't exactly triumph over the Depression.

dude.

more territory was acquired under james k. polk than any other president, but srsly fuck him. that guy sucks.

Well, yes, which reminds us that the initial question is a thorny one. To me it seems to come down to hair and mutton chops.

a bit early to say, but i'd call W probably the worst since buchanan.

xp polk acquired more than jefferson?

http://www.ksdp.org/images/obama.color.small_0.jpg

You gonna sing the song?

he sounds like he was a dick

LBJ was tragically flawed as a president -- GOOD MORNING VIETNAM -- but I'd argue that he was america's most effective president after Franklin Rossevelt on the basis of Civil Rights and the Great Society alone. Johnson was definitely america's best politician, there's hasent been a senator like him since.

I shy off him just a bit because whenever the law stood between him and his war goals, he usually swept the law aside, thereby setting some very awful precedents that are still biting our behinds.

At bottom every president seems to have been a mixed sort of blessing - which is only too typical of politics - so I guess Lincoln still crawls to the top of the heap.

JFK was a warmonger with nice hair and a talent for equiovocation. Getting assassinated before the end of your first term certainly bolstered the Legend of Camelot.

i'll give you lincoln's smoothness as a politico if you wanna criticize him for that, complicated for real

This is what makes Gore Vidal's Lincoln such a compelling read. By confining our knowledge of the president to what we note from the points of view of uncomprehending associates, Vidal paints the subtle and slightly frightening force captured in those great speeches.

Truman would have been up there too, had he actually been able to get health care thru and not had that whole war thing.

And approve the National Security Act of 1947, not to mention the sanction of perfidious foreign ventures in the name of protecting American interests

(xpost to kingfishy)

If we mean presidents who faced a potentially Republic-destroying catrastrophe and triumphed, then there's only three: Washington, Lincoln, and FDR.

arguably, four -- james madison had to deal with nasty brit invaders ripping shit up in DC & baltimore. (i guess you can add andrew jackson, too, in that he's the guy [pre-white house] who won the war of 1812.)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Andrew_Jackson_brave_boy_1780a.jpg

Look upthread for my other reasons to despise Truman. Recently reading the new Dean Acheson biography makes him look worse.

lincoln's constitutional shenanigans!)

Agan, what constitutional shenanigans?? The Constitution authorizes it when "in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."

I find every post-FDR president repellent or worse.

Jimmy Carter doesn't belong on this list, but repellent? he is like an angel, come on.

And the GOP wonders why it can't nominate Rudy Giulani.

if you're talking about the National Security Act of 1947 -- um, you do realize that stalin was still around (and had soviet soldiers all over the place in europe and china) when that thing was signed, yes?

(i haven't read the acheson biography, so i can't comment on that.)

I'm probably forgetting a few, it's been a few years since I cared about recent foreign policy history enough to characterize it as anything but an unending parade of evil.

i think that the soviet occupation of eastern europe was a done deal by 1945, NS Act of 1947 or not. (my crack about FDR and yalta was a bit of a cheap comment on my part -- what COULD he have done at that point?) short of declaring HOT war (as opposed to COLD war) on the soviets & throwing the world (NOT just europe) into another global war -- or just packing up and leaving europe altogether (leaving the rest of europe wide open to the soviets and their supporters over there) -- i don't see what the alternatives would be, for truman or any other president.

I don't think there is any dispute as to who the worst president is, is there?

i think it's all too easy to forget that this was a war fought on american soil, where sedition actually did have the potential to influence the outcome of the war. if you compare lincoln's actions to woodrow wilson's absolutely indefensible attacks on dissent during world war I (a war that took place hundreds of thousands of miles safely away from america, a war that america had virtually NO chance of losing, and a war in which america had virtually no stake to begin with; the overwhelming reason we were even involved was that wilson was a self-righteous "idealist" who believed he'd been appointed by god to save the world from all wars ever - sound familiar?), abe looks like a saint. geoffrey stone, in "perilous times" (a great great book btw) notes that lincoln went out of his way to avoid locking up dissenters whenever he could manage it (compare to, say, the alien and sedition acts, which were passed during peacetime, and you'll start to see how unusual this was).

i agree with alfred that every pres since FDR has been pretty bad. if i had to pick one it'd be LBJ, not just because of his domestic policies (the good done by his civil rights legislation just about balances out the damage done by vietnam) but because he was such a damned fascinating guy, on a shakespearean level - a genuinely tormented character torn between good and evil. ppl talk as if nixon was like that, but nixon was pretty much as shallow and phony and mean as he looked.

and yes, domestically lincoln was a pussycat compared to wilson, FDR, or dubya -- shit, REAGAN was a pussycat domestically compared to any of those three (considering that, IMHO anyway, the soviets were a more grave threat than al-qaeda).

perhaps, but it's easy to say now. it certainly doesn't excuse some of the western excesses during the cold war, but as eisbär says, the sovs were at least a real world power, unlike today's main bogeymen.

it is weird to look back and see claims that indochina or chile or greece would be the fatal domino, though.

http://www.newyorker.com/critics/books/articles/070129crbo_books_crain

my gut answer is truman but i have really no reason!

OTM. What did it say about Wilson that HARDING pardoned Eugene Debs, rotting in jail for being a Red and opposing Wilson for the presidency?

the more i learn about the cold war the more obvious it seems that it was pretty much all our doing. the soviet union had no intention of "spreading communism" to the rest of the world; that was a trotsky notion that stalin had tossed right out the window years before. there's no denying that stalin was a genuinely evil man and that the guys over here were just opportunistic and unprincipled, but that doesn't make the loyalty oaths and the national security act any less a betrayal of america's republican ideals

OTM yet again. This is what I wanted to say but lacked the space, except I would change "pretty much all our doing" to "we allowed Stalin to force our hand."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4f/Andrew_johnson2.jpg

shiroibasketshoes +- guus hiddink

everyone here more or less very much in character

Fantastic discussion here, one of my favorite recent ILE threads:

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

https://radical.town/system/media_attachments/files/002/770/020/original/a24b6b375d03a941.jpg

Eisenhower remains the only president or world leader, so far as I'm aware, that has a jacket style for a namesake.

Surprised designers havent bagged on a Napoleon pocket yet for hoodies. It's a comfortable place to rest your hand, if you've a jacket that allots it.

Dickies Eisenhower jackets rule