A recent survey found that a sampling of about 1,300 Americans
rank Ronald Reagan as our best president since World War II and Barack Obama as
the worst—just nosing out that supreme incompetent George W. Bush AKA Bush II.
I’m not sure what goes into the thinking of most people, but
if we judge the presidents on the good and bad they did, the direction into
which they guided the country and the competence with which they led, Reagan
should rank as the third worst president since World War II—and alas, also the
third worst president ever.
Let’s start with our worst president since Roosevelt and
also our worst president of all time—and it’s not even close. Harry Truman
earns this dubious distinction by virtue of ordering the dropping of atom bombs
on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. People make excuses for these barbarous acts which
led to the slaughter of the largest and second largest number of human beings
in a day’s time in recorded history. Apologists say that Truman saved more
American lives than the bombs took, which is absurd on the surface, since Japan
was already reeling and had already proposed virtually the same terms that they
took at the final surrender. Estimates range from 150,000 to 250,000 killed by
the only two atom bombs ever used on human beings. How could subduing Japan
with conventional airstrikes of munitions factories and military bases taken as
many lives? The almost smarmy assertion that dropping the bombs saved lives also
neglects the fact that the American lives supposedly saved were soldiers,
whereas most of those actually killed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were neither
soldiers nor workers in war factories, but innocent civilians.
Outside of dropping the bombs, Truman’s record is pretty
shabby: He helped to start the cold war. He selected nuclear power over solar
as the primary energy source for the government to support. He nationalized
steel factories to stop a strike. He let Joe McCarthy walk all over the country
and tacitly approved the red scare.
Let’s move on to Bush II. Rating Bush II as a worse
president than Ronald Reagan is a tough call, because they are the two ideologues
most responsible for the economic mess we’re in. In a sense, Bush II completed
the Reagan revolution.
But Bush II led an incompetent regime that pretty much
botched everything it touched. His team
was asleep at the wheel when the 9/11 attacks hit. The response included two of
the most ill-conceived and expensive wars in history, two wars that
destabilized the powder keg that is the Middle East and led to a worldwide loss
of trust in and respect for the United States. Bush II established a torture
gulag across the globe and a spy state at home. Bush II tax cuts starved the
country of much needed funds to invest in the future and help the needy. His
handling of Hurricane Katrina displayed both incompetence and disregard for
suffering.
Any discussion of Ronald Reagan should start with the fact
that he and his team were traitors who should have been placed on trial for
crimes against the United States. I’m referring to the deal with Iran which
kept our hostages in captivity for months longer than they had to be, only so
Reagan could defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. What the Reagan
Administration did for Iran in return seems unconscionable to a patriot: we
sold weapons of warfare. And what did Reagan do with the money from arms sales
to a country the president said was our enemy?
He funded a civil war in Nicaragua.
Even without this treachery, Reagan would still rank among
our three worst presidents of all time. He was the leader of the turn in
American politics around 1980 that has led us down a disastrous path. The
economic plan of Reaganism called for and produced an enormous shift in wealth
from the poor and middle class to the wealthy over a 30+ year period that
continues. His game plan included all the reasons the rich have so much and the
rest of us are struggling: lowering taxes on the wealthy and businesses;
weakening laws that protect unions; privatizing government services; cutting
social services; and gutting Social Security.
Reagan also asked the country to stick its head in the
ground ostrich-like and ignore how our fossil-fuel dependent economy was
degrading the earth and threatening our future.
Now that we have disposed of the truly incompetent and/or
evil presidents, I want to reverse the order of presentation by naming Lyndon
Baines Johnson as the best president we have had since FDR. If we take away the Viet Nam War, it’s an
easy call—Johnson would rank with Lincoln as our greatest of leaders. He passed the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and
Medicaid. He started food stamps, work study, Head Start and a slew of other
anti-poverty programs that worked, no matter how much right-wingers want to
rewrite history. He passed the most generous education bill and the strictest
gun control law in American history. Under Johnson, the space program thrived
and it was only a cruel twist of fate that postponed the first moon landing
until early in Nixon’s first term.
Of course there have always been stories afloat about
Johnson fixing elections early in his career or practicing crony capitalism (as
if any president since Andrew Johnson hasn’t?). But that he was essentially a
decent man comes out again and again, and especially in that transcendent
moment when he learned that the FBI was spying on Martin Luther King and he hit
the roof and ordered it stopped immediately. This ultimate wielder of power
knew better than most that power must be restrained in a free society.
Unfortunately, there is the Viet Nam War, which he inherited
from Eisenhower and Kennedy and bequeathed to Richard Nixon. Viet Nam crystallized all the contradictions
of America’s Cold War policies: imperialism parading as idealism, exaggeration
of the threat from the Soviet Union and an inability to view the world from any
other perspective except that of large multinational corporations. I don’t mean to absolve Johnson—he made the
decisions to escalate and bomb. It was a major flaw that disfigures Johnson as
a historical figure and sullies the rest of his accomplishments.
After Johnson, I select two presidents who were pretty
mediocre, but ruled over good times, made no enormous blunders and led
competent administrations that did a fairly good job of running the country on
a day-to-day basis and responding to the occasional disaster. If you read the
labels most pundits put on these two men, you would think they were miles apart
of political spectrum, but if you instead review their stands, you find them
fairly close indeed. Both were centrist on social policy and both continued the
imperialistic foreign policy that has guided the country since Roosevelt. I’m talking about stodgy Republican Dwight
Eisenhower and rock-star Democrat Bill Clinton. I personally favor Clinton
because he tried to pass single-payer health insurance and presided over a
relative shrinking of the U.S. military and U.S. militarism.
How is it possible that the evil genius of Richard Nixon can
rank as high as fourth among recent presidents? His illegal actions in
Southeast Asia and extension of the Viet Nam War were disgraceful. His dirty
tricks and domestic spying shook the country by being the first visible signs
that technology and centralized power could quickly reduce us to a police
state. But Nixon also opened China, set wage and price controls, continued
Johnson’s poverty and education programs and established the Environmental
Protection Agency and the Occupational Safety & Health Administration. He
also ran a competent administration that responded with reason and rationality
to most challenges, except, unfortunately, the war and Nixon’s political intrigues.
Nixon was a despicable human being by virtually all
accounts, so it’s a little painful to rate him above four essentially likable
men, none of whom had the competence to pursue their agendas: Carter, Obama,
Kennedy and Ford. I find parts of the vision of all four of these men
problematic: Carter was in favor of globalization without protections for U.S.
workers or the environment. Obama is basically a pro-business, anti-union
liberal who shares the consensus view that the United States should have
special rights in world affairs. Kennedy was a militaristic cold-warrior who
fervently believed in cutting taxes on his economic class—the ultra wealthy.
Ford basically was a continuation of Eisenhower and Nixon, a pro-business
cold-warrior open to compromise with progressives on social issues. None of these men had a great impact because
none knew how to work the system like Johnson or Nixon.
That leaves us with Bush I, who is to Reagan what Ford is to
Nixon-Eisenhower, a continuation. Bush I was a little more effective than
Carter or Obama, but his policies kept us down the path to greater inequality.
Here, then is the OpEdge ranking of presidents since 1945.
Of these 12 white males, only three would rank in the top half of all our
presidents. Again, I rate the bottom three as the three most disastrous
presidencies in American history:
- Lyndon Johnson
- Bill Clinton
- Dwight Eisenhower
- Richard Nixon
- Jimmy Carter
- Barack Obama
- John F. Kennedy
- Gerald Ford
- Bush I
- Ronald Reagan
- Bush II
- Harry Truman
It’s the times that usually make the man or woman, and not
the other way around. These men represented ideas that those with wealth and
influence found attractive. Donors, their parties and the think tanks funded by
big individual and corporate money shaped their views. It was General Electric
money, after all, that helped turn Ronald Reagan from a New Dealer to the symbol
of the politics of selfishness. None of these men would have found support if
they didn’t buy into the basic premises of American foreign policy over the
past century.
Since World War II we have made three major wrong turns as a country: The first
was to create the cold war and continue to assert America’s divine right to
intervene anywhere around the world at any time. The second was to ignore the
threat of environmental degradation and resource shortages and build our
economy on wasteful consumerism powered by fossil fuels. The third was to turn
our back on the mixed-model social democracy that we began to establish from
1932-1976 or so and return to economic rules that favored the interests of the
wealthy over everyone else’s. We probably would have taken these treacherous
paths no matter who we had elected president.
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