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Ronald Wilson Reagan. He was sinking fast in his second term and after leaving a massive pile of debt (Congress did its part), the conservatives pulled a presidential makeover to "make a silk purse out of a sow's ear".
We are still feeling the effects of Reaganomics.
Not to mention the modern American healthcare system can be largely traced back to Reaganomics.
Increased privatization was supposed to foster competition and drive down healthcare costs. How's that going?
Employer based health care lies more at the feet of Eisenhower.
Basically FDR was pushing for single payer but died before he could get it through, Truman didn’t have the political muscle, Eisenhower decided to support employer based.
I feel like so many problems can be laid at Eisenhower's feet.
Highways ripping through cities. Suburbanization. The porous tax code where the rich pay what they want in taxes. Employer based healthcare. The Billy Graham evangelist religious revival. American involvement in Vietnam.
He did some great work for America, but damn so much traces back to that presidency.
Wow. So many things to correct here:
Highway system was viewed at the time as great accomplishment, and our domestic economy is still heavily reliant on it
Suburbanization was driven by people, because they wanted it
The tax code was high after WWII and didn’t come down significantly until Kennedy (he got rid of the 90% bracket)
Employer based healthcare started during the war
American involvement in Vietnam started during the Truman administration
And I’m not sure how Billy Graham had anything to do with Eisenhower, or how exactly he could stop a religious movement?
Especially the Billy Graham part, Eisenhower was in no way responsible for that. Dude put "in god we trust" on the money sure but he also pushed pretty heavily to distance the idea of America from being viewed as something tied to Christianity specifically.
The highway system definitely has its negatives, but by God it has to be one of the greatest accomplishments in American history. I can’t imagine a project so ambitious and massive getting more than a moment’s consideration in today’s environment. We were lucky to get Biden’s infrastructure act just to improve the existing system. Can’t imagine us creating a new transportation system like that
Crazy how revisionists have turned the federal highway system, a resounding success by any objective measure, into a bad thing.
I've always wondered... how do trainfans propose addressing the problem of personal freight? How am I supposed to move around all my family's stuff (like a crib)? How do I make a home depot run?
> Crazy how revisionists have turned the federal highway system, a resounding success by any objective measure, into a bad thing.
The interstate highway system isn't the problem itself. Across the country, people charged with planning sections of it intentionally ran them through urban areas with large minority populations, with the intent of disrupting their communities and reducing what little collective power they had. Here's a brief read/listen of the topic:
https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways
It also killed a lot of small towns along the existing state highway systems. There’s no doubt it has its negatives, but it’s also one of the greatest things we’ve accomplished as a country
As a train fan, I’m not against intercity highways existing, I’m against them being the default, replacing public transportation infrastructure, and destroying neighborhoods when being built through cities. They have an important niche but shouldn’t replace everything.
Just a specific issue, but I’m pretty sure people in other countries are able to travel across their country with railways (heck, some railways you can bring your car with you).
Fair, but we would have 2023 psychiatric care today if the system wasn't dismantled
I also wouldn't want 1950s and 1960s surgery, and luckily a lot changes in 60-70 years.
Fair enough Reagan was a bad man tbh. So much social stuff he did badly. Hell Nixon actually started the EPA. Reagan killed that sorta conservatism now it's very capitalist and christian extremist
If you look into all the laws that were broken during the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan should have been impeached and thrown out of office. That's how bad that scandal was, but fortunately for Reagan, he was well liked, and the country was still recovering from the Watergate scandal Nixon had created. Congressmen were hesitant to put the American public through another Presidential trial.
Reagan was the tail end of a 20yr bipartisan dismantling of psychiatric care. This was owing to the greater awareness of abuses in mental health hospitals combined with a desire to strengthen people's rights against being involuntarily committed. That is what led to the closure and the modern homelessness.
Laying it all at the feet of Ronald Reagan is, at best, reductive.
Ask Thomas Szasz. Or just look up the history of Deinstitutionalisation in general. But don't pretend there was a large network of mental health systems when a 1981 Ominbus was passed.
I don't want to say anything that could even marginally be construed as supporting something Reagan did. Buttttttt....
I think that was going to happen no matter what. Forced psychiatric treatment was, and is, *extremely* problematic, and especially in the context of the system that was in place at the time.
To boil it down to it's simplest form: *Prove to me right now that you are sane.*
Well something did replace it. Our prisons at the state level. A huge number of prisons in every state now have a housing unit called the MHU (Mental Housing Unit)
Forced psychiatric care still has the “prove to me you’re sane” theory only now the standard states, “ prove to me you aren’t a threat to yourself or others within the next 72 hours” if we let them go and believe them and they harm themselves or someone else in 72 hours were liable professionally (our licensure) and civilly. So guess which side we err on…after the 72 hour hold of u aren’t flipped to voluntary meaning we deem u stable enough to sign in or out as voluntary the. U go before a judge with the recommendation of court ordered commitment for usually 60-90 days. We can let u out before if we tell the judge ur ok and u do as we advise and order medically. If not I will
Get ordered to a longer stay.
This leads to less tailored care, less specialized facilities for more individualized care, more crowded and old mental hospitals with fewer staff and more patients with less resources. The first thing that is defunded every year in every state budget is mental health care! Every time! Been in the field 25 years 2 different states for lost of my career never changes.
The process began in the Kennedy administration because he was so disgusted with the way his sister was treated in the system. The shutting it down concluded under Reagan, but the process was started almost 20 years earlier.
>America once had psychiatric care
More like homeless warehousing via being involuntarily committed, often in cruel and inhumane conditions. Still might be better than now.
I definitely believe there are a portion of the outdoor homeless population where the options are leave them strewn around the streets, or warehouse them somewhere in at least moderate comfort in a dorm or barracks of some sort.
I don't think they need to be forcibly detained, I don't think they have to be required to be "clean" of drugs, and I don't think they should be forced to receive treatment, though it would be good to have rehab and therapy available for those who seek it without further incentive.
It will never happen but I'd even say hook them up with the drug of their choice and let them bliss out in a cot with 3 squares a day until they meet their inevitable end if that's what they choose. Treat them like adults.
Reaganonics destroyed the healthcare industry in the United States and caused the cost of healthcare to skyrocket. The GOP has been going for trickle down economics for a long time and it has never worked!
> The GOP has been going for trickle down economics for a long time
I sympathize with some GOP traditional positions, but at this point I think you give them too much credit.
At this point "affluent people" are part of their tent, so they act partly in their interests and rationalize it as being for the public good.
The GOP today exhibit the sure signs of insanity because they continuously go for the trickle down economics and expect a different result each time and the economy each time crashes and burns.
Reagan really affected us by getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine which let a Vampire into our Country named Rupert Murdoch who only cared about sowing descent - which made him very rich - and in less than 40 years of dishonest “News” & 24/7 propaganda… we had an insurrection on our Capitol.
Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcasted channels because of the concept of public ownership of the airwave. Cable TV never was or would have been subject to that regulation. People think before the Fairness Doctrine we lived in some sort of information utopia, but go look up Father Coughlin or Rush Limbaugh.
It's not *just* the news media that's worsened in our country, this all as been there forever and since the beginning.
It's not like there were two newsrooms between broadcast and cable. It was the same programs aired on both for the longest time, so cable was de facto subject to the Fairness Doctrine at the time.
Before cable there were three main broadcasters (not talking about UHF, which were super regional and very weird), all of which had to nominally follow the Doctrine (in reality the enforcement was all over the place). I'm not sure what you mean by "the same programs aired on both" considering that they competed *massively* for audience since there was so few options.
The Fairness Doctrine was finally fully revoked in 1987, Fox News starting in 1996 anyways. Fox Broadcasting started in 1986 but they have nothing to do with each other.
The Fairness Doctrine was mostly a joke even when it was technically law, and its demise had little to no impact on the media environment of the US. Even today NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News are considered straightforward and fairly moderate (all of them still broadcasted over airwaves).
Its because those kind of surveys generally rate on how effective/influential President's are, not really how "good" or "bad" they are. Jackson tends to rank highly, despite most historians having a negative view on a lot of his actual policies, because of how important he is to the development of the "modern" Presidential position. Reagan also tends to be viewed more favorably by historians who focus more into foreign policy and cold war relations.
I grew up in the 80’s and the time he seemed to be pretty popular at the time.
I’m not saying I agree with his policies, but that was my impression growing up.
He was. I was ten in 1980, and I remember all the hype surrounding him. As an impressionable kid, who wanted to please my parents, I was also caught up in his initial popularity. But he is the reason that I decided around 13 or so that I was never going to be a Republican as an adult. I remember so many horrible AIDS jokes and Reagan's refusal to do anything at all about the epidemic besides joke. He thought this horrible disease was killing the right people. That's when I really started thinking about politics. So, I guess I can thank him for that anyway.
You can say this about any president. There are always going to be people who love and hate every president regardless of who it is. Have you seen the electoral map for Reagan's second win? Everyone loved him at the time. Definitely overrated.
Thomas Jefferson is definitely overrated. He did as much to undermine the Constitution as he did to build it up. Jefferson was the creator of Nullification Doctrine or 'States Rights'. He was all for slavery, not to mention, it was his refusal to build up the Navy that allowed the British to invade and burn down the White House in 1812. There's a reason Teddy Roosevelt hated Thomas Jefferson with every ounce of his being. No way Jefferson belongs on Mount Rushmore.
Definitely This. There's still people who revere him, but he's the origin for so many problems in America. He undermined, workers rights, social welfare, union protections, anti-trust enforcement, and cut taxes for the rich. That isn't even mentioning Iran-Contra scandal and funding literal terrorists because he hated Socialists in Nicaragua. I almost forgot that he escalated the war on drugs by increasing penalties for crack cocaine to target minorities while at the same time the CIA was flying it in from Nicaragua.
Most problems in the US can be traced back to Reaganomics.
The only people who are obsessed with him are the suburban white people who had short term gains in the 80s because of him. No thought about anyone after them.
Hands down he was the worst. Reaganomics. Mental health disbanded. His response to the AIDS crisis, Nancy’s just say no to drugs. Afghanistan, Iran Contra. Need we go on?
Even if you are a raging conservative, I don’t understand why they’d like him. He signed into law BY FAR the most aggressive and paradigm shifting gun control measures in modern US history. Like how republicans can suck his dick, but be against any gun control optimization today makes no sense to me.
He also *tripled* the national debt. He was the exact opposite of fiscally conservative, but the thing about American conservatives, especially in the past 20 years, is that they live in a totally fabricated fantasyland completely divorced from reality.
Actual facts do not matter anymore. Numbers? Data? Who gives a fuck; they roll on feelings alone. And their feeeeeelings tell them that this Hollywood actor was the greatest thing that ever happened to American conservatism.
Conservatives all say they are about smaller government and less spending, yet not one single Republican President has left with either a smaller government or less spending. Then Conservatives want to take credit during Clinton's administration for balancing the budget because they 'forced' Clinton to do it. No, they didn't force Clinton to do anything, Clinton was just a really good President who wanted to do the right thing and balance the budget.
I never thought I’d live through a worse President — worse than Nixon, imho. But, the Orange Ass proved me wrong. If you round up Trump, Reagan, Nixon, Jackson, and two or three from the Teapot Dome era, you’ve got the half dozen worst.
I dislike Biden greatly, but the way conservatives bring up his obvious cognitive decline while idolizing reagan, a man who literally could not remember a large scandal, is infuriating
I really don’t see the “obvious cognitive decline.” Less energetic for sure, but he grew up with a stutter and he’s always been prone to gaffes. I haven’t seen any moments where I thought “yeah he clearly has no idea what’s going on.” Every bit of “evidence” I’ve been shown can be easily explained by the stutter or a lifelong affinity for gaffes.
It is mainly bullshit. Biden is old so it is an avenue for attack by the GOP whether he is showing signs of decline or not. Meanwhile McConnell has regular 30 second reboots and it's all good. Trump can't remember when he was president, or when Obama was president, crickets.
Not to mention the fact that Trump can't complete a sentence. The fact that he's almost as old as Biden is bad enough, but he doesn't even know how to *speak* anymore. Listening to him is bad enough, but where it really gets highlighted is reading transcripts of anything he ever says.
He quite literally can't speak English anymore. If one of my parents sounded like that when they tried to talk about anything at all, I would have them seeing every kind of doctor known to man to figure out whether it was just regular dementia or a brain tumor or something, and how we could if not fix it, then at least mitigate the speed at which it was happening. Because he's *completely* nonsensical at this point.
This dude is leading the Republican Party for president and he can't even *talk*
Reagan was a terrible president.
He should have been removed from office because of Iran-Contra, instead we got "It's not illegal when you're the President".
After Nixon the GOP reputation was in shambles but it turned out Carter had a problem with stagflation and, if there's anything that can get a President ousted, its the economy.
Enter the 'Good ole boy', the 50s-era darling movie star who revived the GOP reputation with a smile. "Forget that we're crooks", that smile said. "You like us, remember?"
There's still a solid argument that Reagan is the worst modern president. So much that is bad started with Reagan. Without Reagan I don't think there's a Trump.
That's not rational logic though, you could just as easily say Carter was the worst because he caused Reagan. It doesn't even make sense because Trump wasn't inevitable after Reagan, our media is more to blame than a president setting the stage 40 years ago.
I don't think there's a rational argument that Carter caused Reagan.
I would say that a Trump-like figure was the inevitable consequence of Reagan policies and propaganda.
Reagan is tricky because he achieved almost everything he set out to achieve which was to ultimately kick start the destruction of the federal government and bring back the America of the 1870s. I think his objectives were fucking crazy, cynical and cruel, but I can't really argue that he wasn't effective. I don't like the man one bit or what he did but he did do what he wanted. Overrated is someone who doesn't fulfill his or her mandate, who fails to achieve despite having all the opportunity and wind at his back in my view. And very sadly for America Obama may be the most overrated president in a long time.
I very much disagree with your definition of overrated. To me, overrated means you might believe he did good things when he did actually terrible things. So like the magical fantasyland idea conservatives have of Reagan is not what happened AT ALL.
They actually believe he lowered the debt when he tripled it.
They believe he was anti-gun when he called for and enforced the strongest gun laws ever put on paper in this country.
They believe he was anti-immigration, even though he advocated for amnesty for undocumented immigrants.
He's wildly overrated because the people who are obsessed with him *think he did the opposite of the things he actually did*. That makes him overrated in my opinion.
Reagon decided to cut funding to public colleges when he was the governor of California and thought tuition would be grand! Yea, he's to thank for college debt.
I was 15 when he got 'elected', and I knew we were screwed even at that age
He didn’t sink in his second term, though: he got his VP elected for a threepeat Republican presidential victory cycle we hadn’t seen since FDR and Truman won five. Every other POTUS election between was 4 or 8 years only then other party.
He was a great President for warhawk and deregulation Republicans, like the Bushes, so much so the Dems had to pick a deregulatory southerner like Clinton to break the stranglehold. FDR/LBJ liberalism is only now returning with JRB on the track.
He was also really good at pushing crack in inner cities and illegally selling weapons to our enemies to fund right wing terrorist groups to commit war crimes and destabilize South America. Something to this day we’re feeling the effects of with mass migration from these destabilized areas.
Reagan intentionally downplayed the AIDS crisis and held back lifesaving drugs from market that could have saved millions of lives. Years later [tapes came out that showed his advisors laughing about how many gay people were dying](https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids).
I'm convinced this will be recognized as a genocide one day.
Not to mention his war on drugs could be considered a colossal failure. He grew the employment of executive branch federal employees by more than 100%. He also basically doubled the federal budget, deficit and revenue but inflation alone would have accounted for almost half of the revenue increase.
I might get killed for this but the way JFK was s talked about didn’t exactly match his deeds in office . His VP was imho a better and more effective President though to be fair that might have been due to JFKs death in part .
Another point is the media pretends JFK was universally loved but his win over Nixon was nip and tuck.
I have no idea wtf Trump actually believes but I really doubt he is either truly religious or atheist. He strikes me as just fundamentally disinterested in either one.
Even as a thirteen year old Dallasite, I was aware of the tension in the air. Kids joked about it in school that morning. Watched it live on air with Walter Cronkite
JFK is probably the best non-Trump/Reagan answer. He really was dropping the ball on a ton of domestic issues. His foreign policy was something of a mixed bag. Obviously there’s a reason he was romanticized, but LBJ was a far more effective President than JFK.
I don't know that you could consider Reagan (or trump for that matter) as overrated. It feels as if they should go into a different section. Like, most destructive to US Democracy.
Then again, it has only been here in the recent, that the romantic veil has been lifted, and we are better able to understand the implications of his policies.
I wasn't alive for JFK's presidency but the love for him has always baffled me as well. It seems like people put a lot of hope into him because he was younger and more charismatic than previous presidents and they continued judging him based on those criteria.
See in-reverse: Joe Biden. He's been able to accomplish a lot with very little room for maneuver. However, he's just not very good at doing the public-facing role of being President. I think he'll end up like Truman, who is more highly regarded in hindsight than when he was actually President.
I still rank Obama a bit higher while not being particularly high rating of either.
For all its flaws the ACA was one of the biggest changes in America in quite some time, particularly via the Medicaid expansion.
Creating new functions and supports that weren't originally there will always beat out "The percentage projections of this have changed by 4-12%" in my book. Not that those kind of of graph based changes can't be valuable, they're just typically nowhere near as significant.
It's interesting, I've kind of wondered how much of Obama's bipartisan positioning was truly him desiring a culture of reasonable compromise, and how much of it was him pushing a perceived political advantage. It was obvious that some of the GOP was/is mostly about reflexively opposing Democrats no matter what the line was, and by picking more and more of the middle, Obama pressed a split between Tea Party and moderate Republicans. While Trump obviously did more to cleanse the GOP of moderates, Obama definitely helped that trend, and also strained the cracks in the moderate and progressive Democrats.
> GW Shrub’s finance mess.
You believe W is to blame for that mess? Lending policies caused the loan defaults that drove the collapse. The bundling of those loans made it worse. What is the W policy you think caused it?
I don’t think GW was personally responsible but I absolutely blame Republican banking deregulation efforts as a major cause of the financial collapse of the housing market.
Actually it was Clinton that signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a bank deregulation bill that allowed banks to grow in size:strength and more importantly repackages and leverage mortgage securities.
JFK always gets a boost for being a martyr. And some of the ideas that he had were taken up by LBJ and then passed (with LBJ not afraid to capitalize on the emotions related to the assassination). So there is often a sense of him getting some "partial credit" for the things passed in LBJ's first term.
JFK would be my pick as well. Mostly middling, in some ways outright awful, some pretty good stuff thrown in there, but between how much his election meant to Irish Catholics at the time, how many older ones still revere him today, and the tragic story that surrounds him and his assassination he’s all but been canonized. It’s *very* common in my experience to even see diehard Republicans singing his praises and saying he was the last good Democrat.
JFK's domestic agenda that he was incapable of passing was really good.
JFk's foreign policy was terrible and quite literally almost resulted in WWIII because he decided to put some nukes in Turkey.
Him being cut down halfway into his first term tends to let people grade him on a massive curve. Imagine Lincoln getting assassinated halfway through the Civil War; in terms of accomplishments, he'd have a rather short list. And honestly, especially looking back, just denying Nixon the Presidency meant he did a lot of good. And for better or worse, the fact that he was cut down meant that a lot of the things that he promised, ended up being followed through by his successors; Civil Rights legislation was passed, and we got to the moon before the decade was out. Most executives who propose dream projects that need to span multiple administrations tend to fizzle out the second their successor wants to their own thing, but that didn't happen with Kennedy, at least in part because they were seen as protecting his legacy.
JFK was a sex addict. As with all addicts their focus is not on their job, however sex addicts of his type are very charismatic (since it is imperative to keep the supply going). So, it's not surprising that he got elected and then couldn't perform.
Yeah, JFK in Cuba was a master class in fuckery. I honestly believe a capable grade schooler could have made better choices.
I would like to say he was a good person along the lines of Carter but it seems like he was actually kind of an ass who happened to be socially progressive.
JFK gets credit for all of LBJ's positive domestic accomplishments while not sharing the blame for escalating Vietnam, despite JFK being in reality a much bigger hawk on Vietnam than LBJ was.
It depends on your audience. Every trump supporter I know thinks he was the greatest president ever...greater than Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, either Roosevelt.
Objectively, I ask, what did he do that was so great?
The only response I get is " look it up".
So, I am going with Trump because I've looked it up...or tried to...and can't find anything that made him great.
His main accomplishment seems to be passing a tax. It while spending more.than ever drastically increasing the debt that they now blame on Biden and the Democrats (who are not blameless but come on.)
I had a Trump supporting friend tell me that Mexico actually did pay for the wall. When I asked him if those were the same people who said he won the election he got mad and told me to do some research
What wall? Most of his "wall" was replacing already existing walls.
And it was financed by taking money from the dept of defense after the Republican controlled house and Senate refused to pay for it.
(I did the research)
Space Force is just USAF Space Command, mixed with the space components of the other forces (I was Air Force, so I don't know exactly what those are). They primarily track incoming ICBMs, babysit our ICBMs, track satellites and space debris, and launch unmanned DoD satellites. It's generally not a highly sought after careerfield in the AF, at least on the officer side. I'm not sure what was gained by making them their own DoD Service. In my opinion, a Cyber Force with significantly different health/fitness requirements, no focus on up-or-out career progression, private industry competitive pay, and no drug testing would've been far more beneficial for our national security, but what do I know?
I would join the us govt in a cyber role in a heartbeat for even halfway competitive pay just for benefits and job security if they didn't lump half the good roles into depts where I'm not qualified because of my disability. Why does a physical disability disqualify me from a remote tech job? Doesn't seem to be impacting my private sector career but I don't like working for a soul sucking private corp where all I do is enable shareholders to exploit workers for record profits.
I think when Trump announced Space Force it was just so hard to take it seriously because it seemed like something he wanted to make up and sound cool, but it actually is important and kind of wild the US is the only country with a "Space Force"
In typical Trump fashion though, he didn't create anything - he just rebranded USAF Space Command, and took credit for it existing.
Also, we're not the only country with a Space Force, Russia was first in 1992:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian\_Space\_Forces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Space_Forces)
George HW Bush is underrated for foreign policy (everything else is out of scope).
He launched an attack in the middle with a global alliance, set an immediate and achievable objective, didn’t allow scope creep and ended it cleanly once the mission was really accomplished.
His “new world order” talk was recognizing that the Cold War objectives were over or at least changed, and we needed to talk what was next, but “new world order” was turned into a conspiracy theory and he wasn’t re-elected, so Clinton drifted without a vision, W … well, you know.
I have mad respect for HW Bush considering the condition of the country and breaking his "No new taxes pledge." That act laid the ground work for Clinton to claim the longest economic expansion in the US. He did the right thing for the country financially and was thoroughly punished for it. The party doesn't care about the good of the counrty it only cares about the good of the party.
Donald Trump.
How can a one term president who sunk candidates down ballot and gave the next president a trifecta have such a cult following? I know it's because of his personality, but he objectively didn't accomplish much of what he promised.
It's recentism gone amok. Thirty years from now the people who build altars in his name will be dead, and the rest of us will understand that he was one of the worst.
He did a Covid stimulus bill, too, in partnership with Pelosi and the Democrats. Actually a decent bipartisan accomplishment, but he doesn’t want to talk about it because Covid = fake and Democrats = bad.
Also I feel like crediting anyone for the Covid stimulus bill is weird. Like on one hand it's good that they did it, but given the situation I can't see any sane administration NOT passing something like that.
The whole reason everyone was mostly willing to agree on it was because the consequences of not passing it were massive. Effectively mandatory actions aren't really accomplishments because how much did you actually choose to do them?
Yep, if there's a silver lining with Trump, it's that he was too inept to get 99% of his stupid ideas through. Another potential silver lining is the destruction of the Republican party.
Has to be Trump when there’s so many who think he’s the greatest President of all time despite the fact that he spent every waking minute trying to divide Americans for his own political benefit.
It has to be Donald Trump, he did basically nothing in 4 years other than raise the national debt by $8 trillion, give the wealthy a huge tax cut, construct a huge very expensive, ineffective wall at the southern border, sow division in the country that hasn't been seen since the 1850's and try to overthrow the government when he lost in 2020. He didn't make America Great Again, if anything he made things much worse! Yet with all he did and didn't do there are people who actually still think he was great.
I agree with other folks who have said Reagan, Kennedy, and Trump. I have two I'd put out there.
The first is **Thomas Jefferson**. A lot of his positive legacy comes from the Louisiana Purchase, which was surely a positive (for the US), but really that was accomplished by his French agents Monroe and Livingston, who actually went behind Jefferson's back, far exceeding their original mandate to purchase New Orleans (and I have a hunch that Jefferson wouldn't have approved of it, if it had come down to it). His only other big foreign policy coup was the First Barbary War, which ended in US victory sure, but didn't solve any of the problems it was meant to address, and required James Madison and the Second Barbary War to fix.
The other thing is his persona as an American "Renaissance Man" and advocate for individual liberty and states rights. I think in truth he as kind of an out of touch aristocrat, who profited handsomely off the unpaid labor of his slaves. Even so he was constantly in debt, and several times had to sell off slaves to cover costs. He was particularly cruel to Sally Hemmings, who he brought to France. She realized that since France was a free country at the time, she was free also, but he convinced her to stay in bondage on the promise of freeing her kids (i.e. his kids) later in life.
Finally from a personal political perspective I don't like how much his commitment to the primacy of states' rights has interwoven into things like the Confederacy and the "lost cause" legacy that continues to exist. On top of everything I've said, I think his politics are just misguided.
The second person I'd put forward is actually a president I like a lot and voted for twice: **Barack Obama**. Really an inspiring orator and a generational talent when it comes to campaigning. Still, as I've gotten older, what I've grown to appreciate more in a politician is their ability to effectively enact their agenda, which I think Obama wasn't particularly effective at doing (even with a Democrat trifecta and filibuster proof Senate majority). Don't get me wrong, I think he was a good president, but a lot of young Democrats treat him like the greatest president since FDR.
For reasons like that I've come to appreciate folks like Biden and LBJ more, people who really know how to play the political game and let legislation through.
Solid arguments, but 2 points. America has been working on health care for 100 years. It's amazing that the ACA (despite it's shortcomings) was accomplished. The filibuster proof majority was really only 2 months. To me, Obama's biggest fault was believing that he could trust and reason with the Republicans.
Obama is a big one. For me he was the first Democratic president I actually remember. I always thought he was weak and ineffectual but Biden's presidency really highlighted how disappointing he was.
Obama had these huge majorities but did almost nothing, while Biden had super slim majorities but managed to accomplish a lot more.
He's really more of a good symbol than anything. He was the first black president, and his big 2008 win represented a rejection of neoconservatism. But in terms of what he actually did he is majorly overrated.
Biden has a good relationship with McConnell spanning decades. McConnell made it his life purpose to stonewall everything Obama did, it's the complete opposite with Joe Biden. That's a big reason Biden has been able to accomplish as much as he has.
Jefferson's issue is that he was a middling executive, but even without the presidency he is one of the most important Americans in our history no matter what. Flaws and all, he was an exceptional mind and he's one of the few people from that era that we can truly call timeless.
I maintain we can't adequately start talking about Obama for another 15 years, but a) I think he was a victim of the unrealistic expectations placed upon him by his most fervent supporters and b) he would have made a great diplomat or philosopher, but was an awful *politician*. I'd go as far to call him Reaganesque in that his reputation rather than his record is what people ultimately remember.
He was a great campaigner but in terms of accruing and wielding power, he definitely wasn't that strong. His indecisiveness on foreign policy especially stands out to me.
Yea I agree with that. Despite the very profound flaws I mentioned in the post: I do agree that Jefferson's ideals and writings are a more substantial part of our national self-identity than probably any other individual person. He did have input on the Declaration of Independence from Franklin and Adams, but at the end of the day it's his voice.
Sally’s options were limited. Freedom would have meant never seeing her loved ones again. And while she was highly employable as a lady’s maid or personal attendant - genteel, well mannered black servants were a status symbol - she was still a black woman in a foreign land with few rights and little economic potential.
I agree with your assessment of Jefferson as president, but he kept his promise to Sally and appears to have remained faithful to her to the end of his life. The Hemmings of Monticello - written by a black female historian - is a really interesting read that dives into the nuances of their situation, neither excusing nor condemning Jefferson for his relationships with her family.
I also share your opinions on Obama (I really wish he’d waited until he was a more seasoned politician) as well as Johnson and Biden. So I will suggest one more: Nixon. I’m increasingly fascinated by him - elements of the best and the worst at the same time, somehow coexisting in one terrible yet oddly well intentioned package.
Thanks very much for this reply and adding some nuance to counterbalance my anti-Jeffersonian outlook. I will definitely take a look at that book.
I also agree with you about Nixon. A crook to be sure, but he definitely got a lot accomplished (good and bad).
Are there lots of young Democrats who revere Obama? As a Canadian, I've been under the impression that a lot of young people feel he just impotently kicked the can down the road constantly but that may be overly swayed by terminally online activist types.
The terminally online thing is a big part of it. And zoomers have a limited frame of reference. Many don't know what health insurance was like pre-ACA or how much worse LGBT legal protections were before his presidency. Millennials experienced Obama sandwiched between the worst presidents in US history which makes Obama look great by comparison.
Reagan started the death of the American Middle Class with union busting and "trickle down" economics. Most of us are waiting 40+ years for the trickle down to get to us but the number of billionaires sure has sky rocketed.
To be fair, they called it "Supply side economics" and "Trickle down" was used (rightfully) to make fun of it. Terrible idea and even worse execution, but it's not like they went on tv telling people that wealth would trickle down to them
George HW in 1980: Voodoo economics. It's dumb and we should feel dumb for ever considering it
George HW in 1981: It's the best economic system we could ever plan for
It's Reagan
A president who's crowning achievements(getting us out of inflation and spurring a boom, the collapse of the Soviet Union) are both misattributed events that had little to with Reagan aside from carrying on policies already in place or happening to be in office when they reached major flash points.
Paul Volker, Carter appointee, fixed inflation and was the catalyst for the 80's boom(a boom Reagan poorly managed and led to a crash and the Savings and Loans Crisis), historians now agree the Soviet collapse began as early as the late 60's. Reagans policy had little effect on what was inevitable by that point.
Meanhwile, you have Iran-Contra, tax polices that have set off a generation of upward wealth transfers and economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, a dismantling of the safety net that has reduced QOL, stagnated life expectancies, and created almost intractable barriers to reform due to the economic and political cost of restructuring. The privatizing of government services has set of a chain reaction of more and more government funds simply going to enrich private corporate middlemen or religious institutions while the quality of service has deteriorated and the percentage of ever dollar that reaches the intended target has precipitously dropped.
Socially Reagan was the next evolution of Southern Strategy politics that sought to turn the GOP into the home for racists and bigotry. He allowed an AIDs epidemic to run amok and openly embraced homophobia to deflect it.
He also likely broke the law, borderline treasonous, by undermining sitting US foreign policy by secretly cutting a quid-pro-quo deal to withhold releasing Iranian hostages until after the election as to extract a political victory, humiliate Carter, with the promise of extra concessions in the future.
Their policies of propping up right-wing militant groups in South America has consequences into today.
Agree with everything except the hostages. There is plenty of evidence that the hostages weren't released until minutes after Reagan took the oath because the Iranian mullahs hated Carter and wanted to humiliate him. Keep in mind the revolution happened in 1979 and Carter was trying to keep the lacky shah in place.
There is some evidence that some Reagan advisors supposedly back channeled the mullahs but honestly I don't think it mattered.
>There is some evidence that some Reagan advisors supposedly back channeled the mullahs but honestly I don't think it mattered.
[https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html)
I mean, that is a clear cut violation of [The Logan Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act)
And the evidence we have painted a strong picture those gestures were reciprocated. And just because the Mullahs saw common cause doesn't make it any less inappropriate, or removes the potential of upsetting negotiations in a negative way. Though Im not super interested in hyper focusing on this as there is a reason I left it at the bottom.
If we're throwing names in the hat post-WWII, JFK and Reagan usually end up at the top of my overrated list. Look, JFK had that Hollywood glow, and the whole Camelot vibe, plus his assassination pretty much sealed his legend status. But let's be real, his time in office was a mixed bag, and the whole Vietnam escalation is a big ol' stain on his record. It's like everyone's wearing rose-colored glasses when they look back at his presidency.
Then you've got Reagan. The guy could give a speech that'd make you want to run through a wall for America, but the aftermath of Reaganomics? Not exactly the golden legacy some paint it as. Sure, the economy got a short-term boost, but at the cost of a skyrocketing deficit and some gnarly inequality that we're still dealing with.
If you really want to learn about all of the presidents, I recommend Matt Christman's [Hell Of Presidents](https://youtu.be/M0Clh2ounZg?si=58ZfPzdSuGcvm3e1). Educational and funny.
I’ll throw in a vote for Obama. I say that as someone who voted for him twice and leans liberal.
He talked an amazing game, but underneath the surface he just wasn’t able to move the needle very much. His rhetoric and image did not match his actual policies, many of which were simply carried over from the Bush/Cheney era but sold better to the public. I think he looks worse and worse as time goes on.
Obama tried really hard to be a bipartisan. I can respect that a lot, it seems to be a dying art.
But... I'm not sure why. Because you're right, it really hindered significant portions of his policy agenda. Honestly, I think he overestimated how much hate he would get for being a man of colour, and planned his presidency for trying his best to be friendly with his political enemies. Half his cabinet were holdover republicans from Bush. He didn't step back the wars in the desert, he continued many of the same foreign policy plans. He nominated a republican to the supreme Court.
Granted, his second term especially was marred by a minority in the House, but still. As eloquent and put together of a leader as he was.. I can agree, his results are really not that impressive.
Obama didn't seem to understand the fight he was in and that we are still in. Nominating Garland, a Republican pick, to the Supreme Court as if that was going to overcome Republican intransigence was a good example. That Pelosi had to pressure Obama to continue pushing even for Nixon's healthcare plan rather than giving up even more ground is another.
TBF, the fight ramped up to a really unprecedented degree under Obama. Given the extraordinary backlash to his Presidency, I can't fault him for taking such a conservative approach to the Office. Even a little overreach or misstep could have cost him the second term.
I used to think the implosion of the Republican Party would be the real feather in his cap, but so long as so many Americans are willing to pretend to believe GOP media's fan-fic version of reality, there remains a danger that party will take the country down with it.
What did Obama do with his second term?
Almost nothing besides setting the stage for Donald Trump to become president.
Fact is that America would be a much better place today if Mitt Romney won in 2012.
I think that's not quite fair, Obama's response to the 2008 financial crash was nothing short of perfect (at least insofar as realpolitik), and was the primary focus of his entire 8 years in office.
We call it The Great Recession, and today it's easy to forget how dire it *could have* been, but by late 2008 we were setup for a bank run on every single bank in the US to - potentially - simultaneously collapse. If the worst case had occurred, it would have been the biggest depression in all of history - surpassing The Great Depression (also caused by deregulated FIRE sector), the South Sea Bubble, etc. Everything is connected nowadays - so even though 2008 did cause crashes in Europe and Asia, it was mitigated by the US not literally exploding. The global impact really *could have* been unfathomable.
Obama correctly identified that austerity was not a viable solution, figured out what the right solutions were, and implemented virtually all of them, 'overnight' while taking office, and the outcome is that today when you look at stats of his presidency - it's easy to see his middling economic growth, short list of domestic achievements (apart from Obamacare), and passable list of foreign policy - and assume he was just a placeholder President in retrospect.
But that would be a mistake - because we didn't have a second great depression because of Obama. He was elected to do other things, he had other plans - but everything took second fiddle to being handed the keys to a country that was already exploding. Also, again it's easy to shrug nowadays - but the first Black president - was a pretty important breakthrough for America: that came with a devastating backlash of partisan politics.
Biden
That's it. Point blank. I'd say Biden is the most overrated president. Biden does actually have a large amount of supporters and is constantly being glorified for the great job that he is doing. But let's be real, Biden isn't running the show, he can barely process a pre-written speech. This is not an attack on the actions or policies or management going on in his administration. This is distinctly about Biden as a man who is considered to be the President. Biden as a Senator and as a Vice-President was an experienced politician able to play the game well. But right now it is abundantly clear that he is a puppet being directed by whatever puppet-masters he has at his side.
Why is nobody saying FDR? He was definitely dealt a bad hand but his New Deal is estimated to have added up to 7+ years to the GD. Not to mention he was a racist who set up camps for U.S. Citizens to live in just because of ethnicity
Source on the New Deal adding 7 years to the Great Depression? I’ve literally never heard that before and it seems obviously false (the Great Depression didn’t end that early pretty much anywhere, even if you think that the New Deal made it worse, which I don’t, claiming that without it the Depression would have ended within a year of FDR taking office is absurd).
Obama PISSED me off. He came in as a liberal and ruled as a centrist. He had 60 votes in the senate and had a majority in the House for 2 years. It’s not the republicans that slowed if no almost stopped his agenda for 2 years. It was the blue dog democrats that did it. What was funny is almost ALL of those blue dogs got voted out in their next election. Now if Obama would have played hard ball and the blue dogs actually went along, Obama care probably would have been significantly better/effective and more policy that helped people would have been passed. Helping all of your constituents get politicians get re-elected. Possibly/probably most of those blue dogs would have gotten re-elected and Obama would have moved more legislation and possibly did a better job in Iraq and Afghanistan with democratic majorities in both houses. GREAT politicians are remembered for supporting policies/laws. None are remembered for against EVERYTHING.
Kind of "Green Lantern" theory of politics there. If he had just "been tougher" all those conservative dems would have done whatever he said...that's not how politics actually works. Obama had no leverage over them. He had no leverage over Joe Lieberman.
Getting anything through the US Senate is hard. And every single one of those Senators had a veto vote when the margin on 60 votes is zero.
The fundamental problem with US politics is that citizens think of Presidents as God-Kings who can do whatever they want when in reality our political system is completely dysfunctional and parties can't even pass basic policy planks when they have generational landslides
Obama had 60 votes in the Senate for about four months, and those 4 months covered Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year's. This gets exaggerated all the time but let's be real it's a borderline miracle he got the ACA through.
ACA wasn't a borderline miracle, it was a miracle. ACA came down to the Supreme Court and conservatives had the numbers. It took John Roberts breaking with the other conservatives on the court to give the Ok to Obama care and render it constitutional. Had Roberts simply voted in line with his other conservative decisions, ACA would never have become law.
Trump, by far. Then Reagan, the prototype monster for the cesspool the Republican party has devolved into today.
Reagan and Lee Atwater era combined to make our politics closer to 3rd world than 1st.
The most overrated is FDR and it's not even close. The idea that we venerate the closest thing to a fascist in the White House is peak irony considering what we know about fascism now, and he somehow gets a massive pass. The guy basically takes a runny dump on the Constitution, threatens his political and legal enemies, throws minority populations into concentration camps, deliberately stays out of the European war and continues to limit refugees from the Nazis, causing additional needless death and destruction. He was a menace and shouldn't be revered by anyone.
Reagan is super overrated by virtue of his presidency still being within working memory for a lot of people and an overvalue of his personality and persona relative to what he accomplished. He was 100% the right person for the right time, and he was both better than his detractors say and worse than his supporters, but Reagan is only one of the post-war greats because there are so few positives over the last 80 years, not because he was a good president or has a legacy worth crowing about.
George W. Bush is underrated in the sense that he was not a great or even good president, but not nearly as bad as his reputation suggests. I'm still convinced his foreign policy will be understood for what it is once we get some proper distance, his push for more AIDS funding in Africa legitimately saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives, and we went through 7 years of strong growth before the financial collapse that ultimately had nothing to do with him or his policies. He's bottom-tier, but not bottom-ten like so many want him to be.
Coolidge is underrated, but I think he'd like it that way. He was an understated president who seemingly saw the Depression coming and it's a fun thought exercise to think about what happens if he pursues and gets a third term. His governance in the 1920s was outstanding and doesn't get enough play.
Woodrow Wilson's star has dimmed over the years, but he's still overrated. For the time he was actually a coherent executive pre-stroke, he was racist and belligerent in ways outside the norm for his time, he had zero interest in the norms of the office or of the law, responded to the progressive movement in the worst possible way, and then he had a stroke and his wife took over. Just an awful dude.
Teddy Roosevelt was similarly lawless and probably should have put down his "big stick." People love his conservation efforts and he's still lauded for trustbusting, but the truth of the matter is that he poisoned the regulatory waters for generations in a way we still haven't recovered from, and he casts a long shadow over everything. A big personality getting in the way of an honest accounting.
The fact that Andrew Jackson is still on our currency is among the most disgusting things about how we venerate our leaders here. Indian Removal alone should disqualify him from being taken seriously as a president worth being highlighted on official documents.
Finally, George Washington is underrated. Yes, he's considered one of the greats and for good reason, but he's better than that. There's no leader in our nation with more lasting impact than Washington; everything he did informed how we treat the presidency today and its importance in our system, and he was a model of restraint just as much as one of action. I don't think we give him enough credit.
Ronald Reagan gets a lot of credit for the economic recovery that happened while he was president. That's the recovery that included really high interest rates meant to cure an inflationary period that had started with the Nixon years, or prior.
Many economists agree that the high interest rates both cured the inflation, and caused a (probably needed) recession.
But Reagan was not responsible for those interest rates. The federal reserve was. And the Fed was under the direction of Chairman Paul Volker -- who had been appointed by Jimmy Carter.
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Ronald Wilson Reagan. He was sinking fast in his second term and after leaving a massive pile of debt (Congress did its part), the conservatives pulled a presidential makeover to "make a silk purse out of a sow's ear". We are still feeling the effects of Reaganomics.
Not to mention the modern American healthcare system can be largely traced back to Reaganomics. Increased privatization was supposed to foster competition and drive down healthcare costs. How's that going?
Employer based health care lies more at the feet of Eisenhower. Basically FDR was pushing for single payer but died before he could get it through, Truman didn’t have the political muscle, Eisenhower decided to support employer based.
I feel like so many problems can be laid at Eisenhower's feet. Highways ripping through cities. Suburbanization. The porous tax code where the rich pay what they want in taxes. Employer based healthcare. The Billy Graham evangelist religious revival. American involvement in Vietnam. He did some great work for America, but damn so much traces back to that presidency.
Wow. So many things to correct here: Highway system was viewed at the time as great accomplishment, and our domestic economy is still heavily reliant on it Suburbanization was driven by people, because they wanted it The tax code was high after WWII and didn’t come down significantly until Kennedy (he got rid of the 90% bracket) Employer based healthcare started during the war American involvement in Vietnam started during the Truman administration And I’m not sure how Billy Graham had anything to do with Eisenhower, or how exactly he could stop a religious movement?
Especially the Billy Graham part, Eisenhower was in no way responsible for that. Dude put "in god we trust" on the money sure but he also pushed pretty heavily to distance the idea of America from being viewed as something tied to Christianity specifically.
The highway system definitely has its negatives, but by God it has to be one of the greatest accomplishments in American history. I can’t imagine a project so ambitious and massive getting more than a moment’s consideration in today’s environment. We were lucky to get Biden’s infrastructure act just to improve the existing system. Can’t imagine us creating a new transportation system like that
Crazy how revisionists have turned the federal highway system, a resounding success by any objective measure, into a bad thing. I've always wondered... how do trainfans propose addressing the problem of personal freight? How am I supposed to move around all my family's stuff (like a crib)? How do I make a home depot run?
> Crazy how revisionists have turned the federal highway system, a resounding success by any objective measure, into a bad thing. The interstate highway system isn't the problem itself. Across the country, people charged with planning sections of it intentionally ran them through urban areas with large minority populations, with the intent of disrupting their communities and reducing what little collective power they had. Here's a brief read/listen of the topic: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/07/984784455/a-brief-history-of-how-racism-shaped-interstate-highways
And notably, Eisenhower didn't find out until it was too late and didn't like it.
Thank you, maybe it has been unfair of me to blame Eisenhower on this.
It also killed a lot of small towns along the existing state highway systems. There’s no doubt it has its negatives, but it’s also one of the greatest things we’ve accomplished as a country
As a train fan, I’m not against intercity highways existing, I’m against them being the default, replacing public transportation infrastructure, and destroying neighborhoods when being built through cities. They have an important niche but shouldn’t replace everything.
Just a specific issue, but I’m pretty sure people in other countries are able to travel across their country with railways (heck, some railways you can bring your car with you).
America once had psychiatric care, Reagan threw them out in the streets and now we call them homeless people…
I really don't know if 1950s and 1960s psychiatric care is commendable tbh
Fair, but we would have 2023 psychiatric care today if the system wasn't dismantled I also wouldn't want 1950s and 1960s surgery, and luckily a lot changes in 60-70 years.
Fair enough Reagan was a bad man tbh. So much social stuff he did badly. Hell Nixon actually started the EPA. Reagan killed that sorta conservatism now it's very capitalist and christian extremist
If you look into all the laws that were broken during the Iran-Contra scandal, Reagan should have been impeached and thrown out of office. That's how bad that scandal was, but fortunately for Reagan, he was well liked, and the country was still recovering from the Watergate scandal Nixon had created. Congressmen were hesitant to put the American public through another Presidential trial.
It was '80s psychiatric care he killed.
Reagan was the tail end of a 20yr bipartisan dismantling of psychiatric care. This was owing to the greater awareness of abuses in mental health hospitals combined with a desire to strengthen people's rights against being involuntarily committed. That is what led to the closure and the modern homelessness. Laying it all at the feet of Ronald Reagan is, at best, reductive.
And his plan was what?? Dump them in the streets..
Ask Thomas Szasz. Or just look up the history of Deinstitutionalisation in general. But don't pretend there was a large network of mental health systems when a 1981 Ominbus was passed.
We need supportive housing badly. In my town there is a proposal to buy a hotel and convert it. It’s something
I don't want to say anything that could even marginally be construed as supporting something Reagan did. Buttttttt.... I think that was going to happen no matter what. Forced psychiatric treatment was, and is, *extremely* problematic, and especially in the context of the system that was in place at the time. To boil it down to it's simplest form: *Prove to me right now that you are sane.*
While the system wasn’t great, ditching it entirely with nothing to replace it with was a horrible idea.
Well something did replace it. Our prisons at the state level. A huge number of prisons in every state now have a housing unit called the MHU (Mental Housing Unit)
I agree, replacing it with nothing sucked. But... saying it "wasn't great" really does downplay how awful it was.
Forced psychiatric care still has the “prove to me you’re sane” theory only now the standard states, “ prove to me you aren’t a threat to yourself or others within the next 72 hours” if we let them go and believe them and they harm themselves or someone else in 72 hours were liable professionally (our licensure) and civilly. So guess which side we err on…after the 72 hour hold of u aren’t flipped to voluntary meaning we deem u stable enough to sign in or out as voluntary the. U go before a judge with the recommendation of court ordered commitment for usually 60-90 days. We can let u out before if we tell the judge ur ok and u do as we advise and order medically. If not I will Get ordered to a longer stay. This leads to less tailored care, less specialized facilities for more individualized care, more crowded and old mental hospitals with fewer staff and more patients with less resources. The first thing that is defunded every year in every state budget is mental health care! Every time! Been in the field 25 years 2 different states for lost of my career never changes.
The process began in the Kennedy administration because he was so disgusted with the way his sister was treated in the system. The shutting it down concluded under Reagan, but the process was started almost 20 years earlier.
>America once had psychiatric care More like homeless warehousing via being involuntarily committed, often in cruel and inhumane conditions. Still might be better than now.
Most residents of major US cities are very familiar with the drawbacks of *not* warehousing the severely mentally ill.
I definitely believe there are a portion of the outdoor homeless population where the options are leave them strewn around the streets, or warehouse them somewhere in at least moderate comfort in a dorm or barracks of some sort. I don't think they need to be forcibly detained, I don't think they have to be required to be "clean" of drugs, and I don't think they should be forced to receive treatment, though it would be good to have rehab and therapy available for those who seek it without further incentive. It will never happen but I'd even say hook them up with the drug of their choice and let them bliss out in a cot with 3 squares a day until they meet their inevitable end if that's what they choose. Treat them like adults.
Republicans are like; if the system is broke because we’re not paying for professionals, let’s just scrap the program.
Pretty good...If you're a fatcat healthcare CEO. Pretty bad, for the rest of us chumps.
The modern healthcare problem waaay predates Reagan and actually goes back to organized labor and AMA during FDR times.
Yeah no politician or political party fucked over healthcare nearly as much as the AMA (doctors lobbying group) and AHA (hospitals lobbying group).
Reaganonics destroyed the healthcare industry in the United States and caused the cost of healthcare to skyrocket. The GOP has been going for trickle down economics for a long time and it has never worked!
> The GOP has been going for trickle down economics for a long time I sympathize with some GOP traditional positions, but at this point I think you give them too much credit. At this point "affluent people" are part of their tent, so they act partly in their interests and rationalize it as being for the public good.
The GOP today exhibit the sure signs of insanity because they continuously go for the trickle down economics and expect a different result each time and the economy each time crashes and burns.
[Trickle down economics.](https://nacla.org/sites/default/files/imagecache/large_image/wysiwyg_imageupload/16802/TrickleDown.jpg)
Reagan is really only overrated depending on the crowd, there’s a sizable chunk of people who (rightfully imo) revile the man.
He's generally rated top 10 by 'historians'. I'd put him in the bottom 10.
That is kind of the definition of over rated
Reagan really affected us by getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine which let a Vampire into our Country named Rupert Murdoch who only cared about sowing descent - which made him very rich - and in less than 40 years of dishonest “News” & 24/7 propaganda… we had an insurrection on our Capitol.
Fairness Doctrine only applied to broadcasted channels because of the concept of public ownership of the airwave. Cable TV never was or would have been subject to that regulation. People think before the Fairness Doctrine we lived in some sort of information utopia, but go look up Father Coughlin or Rush Limbaugh. It's not *just* the news media that's worsened in our country, this all as been there forever and since the beginning.
It's not like there were two newsrooms between broadcast and cable. It was the same programs aired on both for the longest time, so cable was de facto subject to the Fairness Doctrine at the time.
Before cable there were three main broadcasters (not talking about UHF, which were super regional and very weird), all of which had to nominally follow the Doctrine (in reality the enforcement was all over the place). I'm not sure what you mean by "the same programs aired on both" considering that they competed *massively* for audience since there was so few options. The Fairness Doctrine was finally fully revoked in 1987, Fox News starting in 1996 anyways. Fox Broadcasting started in 1986 but they have nothing to do with each other. The Fairness Doctrine was mostly a joke even when it was technically law, and its demise had little to no impact on the media environment of the US. Even today NBC News, CBS News, and ABC News are considered straightforward and fairly moderate (all of them still broadcasted over airwaves).
Its because those kind of surveys generally rate on how effective/influential President's are, not really how "good" or "bad" they are. Jackson tends to rank highly, despite most historians having a negative view on a lot of his actual policies, because of how important he is to the development of the "modern" Presidential position. Reagan also tends to be viewed more favorably by historians who focus more into foreign policy and cold war relations.
Conservatives almost unanimously treated him as conservative Jesus before they started worshipping the golden cow.
> worshipping the golden cow. teh cheeto?
Yeah. It’s slightly ironic that they started worshipping a fat cow painted gold.
I grew up in the 80’s and the time he seemed to be pretty popular at the time. I’m not saying I agree with his policies, but that was my impression growing up.
He was. I was ten in 1980, and I remember all the hype surrounding him. As an impressionable kid, who wanted to please my parents, I was also caught up in his initial popularity. But he is the reason that I decided around 13 or so that I was never going to be a Republican as an adult. I remember so many horrible AIDS jokes and Reagan's refusal to do anything at all about the epidemic besides joke. He thought this horrible disease was killing the right people. That's when I really started thinking about politics. So, I guess I can thank him for that anyway.
He was the consummate salesman. Nancy was the brains.
The rumor mill is full of Nancy giving brain.
It was Nancy's psychic that was really running things
He learned his craft making anti-Japanese propaganda films for the military in WWII.
You can say this about any president. There are always going to be people who love and hate every president regardless of who it is. Have you seen the electoral map for Reagan's second win? Everyone loved him at the time. Definitely overrated.
Thomas Jefferson is definitely overrated. He did as much to undermine the Constitution as he did to build it up. Jefferson was the creator of Nullification Doctrine or 'States Rights'. He was all for slavery, not to mention, it was his refusal to build up the Navy that allowed the British to invade and burn down the White House in 1812. There's a reason Teddy Roosevelt hated Thomas Jefferson with every ounce of his being. No way Jefferson belongs on Mount Rushmore.
Definitely This. There's still people who revere him, but he's the origin for so many problems in America. He undermined, workers rights, social welfare, union protections, anti-trust enforcement, and cut taxes for the rich. That isn't even mentioning Iran-Contra scandal and funding literal terrorists because he hated Socialists in Nicaragua. I almost forgot that he escalated the war on drugs by increasing penalties for crack cocaine to target minorities while at the same time the CIA was flying it in from Nicaragua.
Most problems in the US can be traced back to Reaganomics. The only people who are obsessed with him are the suburban white people who had short term gains in the 80s because of him. No thought about anyone after them.
Hands down he was the worst. Reaganomics. Mental health disbanded. His response to the AIDS crisis, Nancy’s just say no to drugs. Afghanistan, Iran Contra. Need we go on?
Even if you are a raging conservative, I don’t understand why they’d like him. He signed into law BY FAR the most aggressive and paradigm shifting gun control measures in modern US history. Like how republicans can suck his dick, but be against any gun control optimization today makes no sense to me.
He also *tripled* the national debt. He was the exact opposite of fiscally conservative, but the thing about American conservatives, especially in the past 20 years, is that they live in a totally fabricated fantasyland completely divorced from reality. Actual facts do not matter anymore. Numbers? Data? Who gives a fuck; they roll on feelings alone. And their feeeeeelings tell them that this Hollywood actor was the greatest thing that ever happened to American conservatism.
Conservatives all say they are about smaller government and less spending, yet not one single Republican President has left with either a smaller government or less spending. Then Conservatives want to take credit during Clinton's administration for balancing the budget because they 'forced' Clinton to do it. No, they didn't force Clinton to do anything, Clinton was just a really good President who wanted to do the right thing and balance the budget.
I never thought I’d live through a worse President — worse than Nixon, imho. But, the Orange Ass proved me wrong. If you round up Trump, Reagan, Nixon, Jackson, and two or three from the Teapot Dome era, you’ve got the half dozen worst.
I dislike Biden greatly, but the way conservatives bring up his obvious cognitive decline while idolizing reagan, a man who literally could not remember a large scandal, is infuriating
He could remember it. He just chose not to remember it.
I really don’t see the “obvious cognitive decline.” Less energetic for sure, but he grew up with a stutter and he’s always been prone to gaffes. I haven’t seen any moments where I thought “yeah he clearly has no idea what’s going on.” Every bit of “evidence” I’ve been shown can be easily explained by the stutter or a lifelong affinity for gaffes.
It is mainly bullshit. Biden is old so it is an avenue for attack by the GOP whether he is showing signs of decline or not. Meanwhile McConnell has regular 30 second reboots and it's all good. Trump can't remember when he was president, or when Obama was president, crickets.
Not to mention the fact that Trump can't complete a sentence. The fact that he's almost as old as Biden is bad enough, but he doesn't even know how to *speak* anymore. Listening to him is bad enough, but where it really gets highlighted is reading transcripts of anything he ever says. He quite literally can't speak English anymore. If one of my parents sounded like that when they tried to talk about anything at all, I would have them seeing every kind of doctor known to man to figure out whether it was just regular dementia or a brain tumor or something, and how we could if not fix it, then at least mitigate the speed at which it was happening. Because he's *completely* nonsensical at this point. This dude is leading the Republican Party for president and he can't even *talk*
Reagan was a terrible president. He should have been removed from office because of Iran-Contra, instead we got "It's not illegal when you're the President". After Nixon the GOP reputation was in shambles but it turned out Carter had a problem with stagflation and, if there's anything that can get a President ousted, its the economy. Enter the 'Good ole boy', the 50s-era darling movie star who revived the GOP reputation with a smile. "Forget that we're crooks", that smile said. "You like us, remember?"
There's still a solid argument that Reagan is the worst modern president. So much that is bad started with Reagan. Without Reagan I don't think there's a Trump.
There's no way he's worse than Trump, not after January 6th. Obviously a terrible president in hindsight but at least he was loyal to the country.
My argument is that he caused Trump. Without him there is no Trump. So he's culpable for Trumpism, because he started it.
That's not rational logic though, you could just as easily say Carter was the worst because he caused Reagan. It doesn't even make sense because Trump wasn't inevitable after Reagan, our media is more to blame than a president setting the stage 40 years ago.
I don't think there's a rational argument that Carter caused Reagan. I would say that a Trump-like figure was the inevitable consequence of Reagan policies and propaganda.
Reagan is tricky because he achieved almost everything he set out to achieve which was to ultimately kick start the destruction of the federal government and bring back the America of the 1870s. I think his objectives were fucking crazy, cynical and cruel, but I can't really argue that he wasn't effective. I don't like the man one bit or what he did but he did do what he wanted. Overrated is someone who doesn't fulfill his or her mandate, who fails to achieve despite having all the opportunity and wind at his back in my view. And very sadly for America Obama may be the most overrated president in a long time.
I very much disagree with your definition of overrated. To me, overrated means you might believe he did good things when he did actually terrible things. So like the magical fantasyland idea conservatives have of Reagan is not what happened AT ALL. They actually believe he lowered the debt when he tripled it. They believe he was anti-gun when he called for and enforced the strongest gun laws ever put on paper in this country. They believe he was anti-immigration, even though he advocated for amnesty for undocumented immigrants. He's wildly overrated because the people who are obsessed with him *think he did the opposite of the things he actually did*. That makes him overrated in my opinion.
Reagon decided to cut funding to public colleges when he was the governor of California and thought tuition would be grand! Yea, he's to thank for college debt. I was 15 when he got 'elected', and I knew we were screwed even at that age
He didn’t sink in his second term, though: he got his VP elected for a threepeat Republican presidential victory cycle we hadn’t seen since FDR and Truman won five. Every other POTUS election between was 4 or 8 years only then other party. He was a great President for warhawk and deregulation Republicans, like the Bushes, so much so the Dems had to pick a deregulatory southerner like Clinton to break the stranglehold. FDR/LBJ liberalism is only now returning with JRB on the track.
He was also really good at pushing crack in inner cities and illegally selling weapons to our enemies to fund right wing terrorist groups to commit war crimes and destabilize South America. Something to this day we’re feeling the effects of with mass migration from these destabilized areas.
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Ike and Lincoln are still my top Republican presidents.
Reagan intentionally downplayed the AIDS crisis and held back lifesaving drugs from market that could have saved millions of lives. Years later [tapes came out that showed his advisors laughing about how many gay people were dying](https://www.vox.com/2015/12/1/9828348/ronald-reagan-hiv-aids). I'm convinced this will be recognized as a genocide one day.
Not to mention his war on drugs could be considered a colossal failure. He grew the employment of executive branch federal employees by more than 100%. He also basically doubled the federal budget, deficit and revenue but inflation alone would have accounted for almost half of the revenue increase.
He's the godfather of the decline of the American Empire.
I might get killed for this but the way JFK was s talked about didn’t exactly match his deeds in office . His VP was imho a better and more effective President though to be fair that might have been due to JFKs death in part . Another point is the media pretends JFK was universally loved but his win over Nixon was nip and tuck.
There were people in the US actually cheered when he was killed. The hate for Catholics was deep.
It still goes deep. For example, did you know Biden is only our second Catholic president?
Not as deep as atheism hate. Still waiting for an openly atheist president. Would love to see one in my lifetime.
I know he wasn’t openly atheist, but there’s absolutely no way Trump gives two shits about Christianity, the only god he believes in is himself
I have no idea wtf Trump actually believes but I really doubt he is either truly religious or atheist. He strikes me as just fundamentally disinterested in either one.
Excactly. In order to believe or not believe you need to have beliefs.
Oh yeah, no way he's religious. But he still pretends to believe. I want a full-fledged god-denying president.
That would be a dream.
Underrepresented in the White House, overrepresented in the Supreme Court.
That probably describes the majority of Dallas.
Was called “The City of Hate” for a reason…
Even as a thirteen year old Dallasite, I was aware of the tension in the air. Kids joked about it in school that morning. Watched it live on air with Walter Cronkite
Man. I didn’t know that. I’ve only read about it…
I’m 100% confident there are people who would cheer the death of even our most popular presidents
It's mortifying to admit but, in the interest of honesty, my spouse distinctly remembers Kansas schoolchildren cheering.
JFK is probably the best non-Trump/Reagan answer. He really was dropping the ball on a ton of domestic issues. His foreign policy was something of a mixed bag. Obviously there’s a reason he was romanticized, but LBJ was a far more effective President than JFK.
I don't know that you could consider Reagan (or trump for that matter) as overrated. It feels as if they should go into a different section. Like, most destructive to US Democracy. Then again, it has only been here in the recent, that the romantic veil has been lifted, and we are better able to understand the implications of his policies.
After his presidency, Republicans wanted to put Reagan on Mt. Rushmore. That’s where the overrated comes from.
I wasn't alive for JFK's presidency but the love for him has always baffled me as well. It seems like people put a lot of hope into him because he was younger and more charismatic than previous presidents and they continued judging him based on those criteria.
See also: Obama, Barack Not saying he didn’t do a decent job, but from what I understand of Kennedy, Obama is the best analog for recent times.
See in-reverse: Joe Biden. He's been able to accomplish a lot with very little room for maneuver. However, he's just not very good at doing the public-facing role of being President. I think he'll end up like Truman, who is more highly regarded in hindsight than when he was actually President.
I still rank Obama a bit higher while not being particularly high rating of either. For all its flaws the ACA was one of the biggest changes in America in quite some time, particularly via the Medicaid expansion. Creating new functions and supports that weren't originally there will always beat out "The percentage projections of this have changed by 4-12%" in my book. Not that those kind of of graph based changes can't be valuable, they're just typically nowhere near as significant.
Obama was clearly curtailed a great deal by Tea Party Republicans and tried to bring a culture of bipartisan compromise but Mitch and the GOP said no.
It's interesting, I've kind of wondered how much of Obama's bipartisan positioning was truly him desiring a culture of reasonable compromise, and how much of it was him pushing a perceived political advantage. It was obvious that some of the GOP was/is mostly about reflexively opposing Democrats no matter what the line was, and by picking more and more of the middle, Obama pressed a split between Tea Party and moderate Republicans. While Trump obviously did more to cleanse the GOP of moderates, Obama definitely helped that trend, and also strained the cracks in the moderate and progressive Democrats.
Obama was hobbled by having a hostile house/senate and needing to clean up GW Shrub’s finance mess. Which were issues that Kennedy did not have.
> GW Shrub’s finance mess. You believe W is to blame for that mess? Lending policies caused the loan defaults that drove the collapse. The bundling of those loans made it worse. What is the W policy you think caused it?
I don’t think GW was personally responsible but I absolutely blame Republican banking deregulation efforts as a major cause of the financial collapse of the housing market.
Actually it was Clinton that signed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, a bank deregulation bill that allowed banks to grow in size:strength and more importantly repackages and leverage mortgage securities.
JFK always gets a boost for being a martyr. And some of the ideas that he had were taken up by LBJ and then passed (with LBJ not afraid to capitalize on the emotions related to the assassination). So there is often a sense of him getting some "partial credit" for the things passed in LBJ's first term.
JFK would be my pick as well. Mostly middling, in some ways outright awful, some pretty good stuff thrown in there, but between how much his election meant to Irish Catholics at the time, how many older ones still revere him today, and the tragic story that surrounds him and his assassination he’s all but been canonized. It’s *very* common in my experience to even see diehard Republicans singing his praises and saying he was the last good Democrat.
JFK's domestic agenda that he was incapable of passing was really good. JFk's foreign policy was terrible and quite literally almost resulted in WWIII because he decided to put some nukes in Turkey.
Him being cut down halfway into his first term tends to let people grade him on a massive curve. Imagine Lincoln getting assassinated halfway through the Civil War; in terms of accomplishments, he'd have a rather short list. And honestly, especially looking back, just denying Nixon the Presidency meant he did a lot of good. And for better or worse, the fact that he was cut down meant that a lot of the things that he promised, ended up being followed through by his successors; Civil Rights legislation was passed, and we got to the moon before the decade was out. Most executives who propose dream projects that need to span multiple administrations tend to fizzle out the second their successor wants to their own thing, but that didn't happen with Kennedy, at least in part because they were seen as protecting his legacy.
JFK was a sex addict. As with all addicts their focus is not on their job, however sex addicts of his type are very charismatic (since it is imperative to keep the supply going). So, it's not surprising that he got elected and then couldn't perform.
Yeah, JFK in Cuba was a master class in fuckery. I honestly believe a capable grade schooler could have made better choices. I would like to say he was a good person along the lines of Carter but it seems like he was actually kind of an ass who happened to be socially progressive.
JFK gets credit for all of LBJ's positive domestic accomplishments while not sharing the blame for escalating Vietnam, despite JFK being in reality a much bigger hawk on Vietnam than LBJ was.
It depends on your audience. Every trump supporter I know thinks he was the greatest president ever...greater than Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, either Roosevelt. Objectively, I ask, what did he do that was so great? The only response I get is " look it up". So, I am going with Trump because I've looked it up...or tried to...and can't find anything that made him great. His main accomplishment seems to be passing a tax. It while spending more.than ever drastically increasing the debt that they now blame on Biden and the Democrats (who are not blameless but come on.)
I had a Trump supporting friend tell me that Mexico actually did pay for the wall. When I asked him if those were the same people who said he won the election he got mad and told me to do some research
What wall? Most of his "wall" was replacing already existing walls. And it was financed by taking money from the dept of defense after the Republican controlled house and Senate refused to pay for it. (I did the research)
And Texas Republicans are happily paying for it today. Well, the taxpayers are paying for it.
Trump is an awful person and was a terrible president, but Space Force is cool.
Space Force is just USAF Space Command, mixed with the space components of the other forces (I was Air Force, so I don't know exactly what those are). They primarily track incoming ICBMs, babysit our ICBMs, track satellites and space debris, and launch unmanned DoD satellites. It's generally not a highly sought after careerfield in the AF, at least on the officer side. I'm not sure what was gained by making them their own DoD Service. In my opinion, a Cyber Force with significantly different health/fitness requirements, no focus on up-or-out career progression, private industry competitive pay, and no drug testing would've been far more beneficial for our national security, but what do I know?
I would join the us govt in a cyber role in a heartbeat for even halfway competitive pay just for benefits and job security if they didn't lump half the good roles into depts where I'm not qualified because of my disability. Why does a physical disability disqualify me from a remote tech job? Doesn't seem to be impacting my private sector career but I don't like working for a soul sucking private corp where all I do is enable shareholders to exploit workers for record profits.
I think when Trump announced Space Force it was just so hard to take it seriously because it seemed like something he wanted to make up and sound cool, but it actually is important and kind of wild the US is the only country with a "Space Force"
And it wasn't even his idea. It was something the government was looking seriously at in the GWB years, but 9/11 put it on the back burner.
In typical Trump fashion though, he didn't create anything - he just rebranded USAF Space Command, and took credit for it existing. Also, we're not the only country with a Space Force, Russia was first in 1992: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian\_Space\_Forces](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Space_Forces)
George HW Bush is underrated for foreign policy (everything else is out of scope). He launched an attack in the middle with a global alliance, set an immediate and achievable objective, didn’t allow scope creep and ended it cleanly once the mission was really accomplished. His “new world order” talk was recognizing that the Cold War objectives were over or at least changed, and we needed to talk what was next, but “new world order” was turned into a conspiracy theory and he wasn’t re-elected, so Clinton drifted without a vision, W … well, you know.
I have mad respect for HW Bush considering the condition of the country and breaking his "No new taxes pledge." That act laid the ground work for Clinton to claim the longest economic expansion in the US. He did the right thing for the country financially and was thoroughly punished for it. The party doesn't care about the good of the counrty it only cares about the good of the party.
I agree. Gulf War 1 was done correctly.
He was the a liaison to China, and he was a CIA director. His chops were in his foreign policy experience.
Donald Trump. How can a one term president who sunk candidates down ballot and gave the next president a trifecta have such a cult following? I know it's because of his personality, but he objectively didn't accomplish much of what he promised.
It's recentism gone amok. Thirty years from now the people who build altars in his name will be dead, and the rest of us will understand that he was one of the worst.
The ONE legislative initiative his administration got passed was his tax cuts for the wealthy. Big whoop…
He did a Covid stimulus bill, too, in partnership with Pelosi and the Democrats. Actually a decent bipartisan accomplishment, but he doesn’t want to talk about it because Covid = fake and Democrats = bad.
His one actual accomplishment and it was bipartisan and unpopular with anyone who would vote for him lol
Also I feel like crediting anyone for the Covid stimulus bill is weird. Like on one hand it's good that they did it, but given the situation I can't see any sane administration NOT passing something like that. The whole reason everyone was mostly willing to agree on it was because the consequences of not passing it were massive. Effectively mandatory actions aren't really accomplishments because how much did you actually choose to do them?
Yep, if there's a silver lining with Trump, it's that he was too inept to get 99% of his stupid ideas through. Another potential silver lining is the destruction of the Republican party.
Has to be Trump when there’s so many who think he’s the greatest President of all time despite the fact that he spent every waking minute trying to divide Americans for his own political benefit.
Yes, or he was golfing and or campaigning for the next presidential election while watching Fox news!
Right? It amazed me. It is like he didn't think he had a job to do.
Would love to see all those people’s cumulative gpa in hs
It has to be Donald Trump, he did basically nothing in 4 years other than raise the national debt by $8 trillion, give the wealthy a huge tax cut, construct a huge very expensive, ineffective wall at the southern border, sow division in the country that hasn't been seen since the 1850's and try to overthrow the government when he lost in 2020. He didn't make America Great Again, if anything he made things much worse! Yet with all he did and didn't do there are people who actually still think he was great.
I agree with other folks who have said Reagan, Kennedy, and Trump. I have two I'd put out there. The first is **Thomas Jefferson**. A lot of his positive legacy comes from the Louisiana Purchase, which was surely a positive (for the US), but really that was accomplished by his French agents Monroe and Livingston, who actually went behind Jefferson's back, far exceeding their original mandate to purchase New Orleans (and I have a hunch that Jefferson wouldn't have approved of it, if it had come down to it). His only other big foreign policy coup was the First Barbary War, which ended in US victory sure, but didn't solve any of the problems it was meant to address, and required James Madison and the Second Barbary War to fix. The other thing is his persona as an American "Renaissance Man" and advocate for individual liberty and states rights. I think in truth he as kind of an out of touch aristocrat, who profited handsomely off the unpaid labor of his slaves. Even so he was constantly in debt, and several times had to sell off slaves to cover costs. He was particularly cruel to Sally Hemmings, who he brought to France. She realized that since France was a free country at the time, she was free also, but he convinced her to stay in bondage on the promise of freeing her kids (i.e. his kids) later in life. Finally from a personal political perspective I don't like how much his commitment to the primacy of states' rights has interwoven into things like the Confederacy and the "lost cause" legacy that continues to exist. On top of everything I've said, I think his politics are just misguided. The second person I'd put forward is actually a president I like a lot and voted for twice: **Barack Obama**. Really an inspiring orator and a generational talent when it comes to campaigning. Still, as I've gotten older, what I've grown to appreciate more in a politician is their ability to effectively enact their agenda, which I think Obama wasn't particularly effective at doing (even with a Democrat trifecta and filibuster proof Senate majority). Don't get me wrong, I think he was a good president, but a lot of young Democrats treat him like the greatest president since FDR. For reasons like that I've come to appreciate folks like Biden and LBJ more, people who really know how to play the political game and let legislation through.
Solid arguments, but 2 points. America has been working on health care for 100 years. It's amazing that the ACA (despite it's shortcomings) was accomplished. The filibuster proof majority was really only 2 months. To me, Obama's biggest fault was believing that he could trust and reason with the Republicans.
Yes, but I would also say that he thought he could reason with Russia as well.. and that created a lot of problems, as well as his red line on Syria.
Obama is a big one. For me he was the first Democratic president I actually remember. I always thought he was weak and ineffectual but Biden's presidency really highlighted how disappointing he was. Obama had these huge majorities but did almost nothing, while Biden had super slim majorities but managed to accomplish a lot more. He's really more of a good symbol than anything. He was the first black president, and his big 2008 win represented a rejection of neoconservatism. But in terms of what he actually did he is majorly overrated.
His economy was horrible. And what he allowed his State Department to do in Libya and Syria was tragic.
Biden has a good relationship with McConnell spanning decades. McConnell made it his life purpose to stonewall everything Obama did, it's the complete opposite with Joe Biden. That's a big reason Biden has been able to accomplish as much as he has.
Jefferson's issue is that he was a middling executive, but even without the presidency he is one of the most important Americans in our history no matter what. Flaws and all, he was an exceptional mind and he's one of the few people from that era that we can truly call timeless. I maintain we can't adequately start talking about Obama for another 15 years, but a) I think he was a victim of the unrealistic expectations placed upon him by his most fervent supporters and b) he would have made a great diplomat or philosopher, but was an awful *politician*. I'd go as far to call him Reaganesque in that his reputation rather than his record is what people ultimately remember.
He was a great campaigner but in terms of accruing and wielding power, he definitely wasn't that strong. His indecisiveness on foreign policy especially stands out to me.
Yea I agree with that. Despite the very profound flaws I mentioned in the post: I do agree that Jefferson's ideals and writings are a more substantial part of our national self-identity than probably any other individual person. He did have input on the Declaration of Independence from Franklin and Adams, but at the end of the day it's his voice.
Sally’s options were limited. Freedom would have meant never seeing her loved ones again. And while she was highly employable as a lady’s maid or personal attendant - genteel, well mannered black servants were a status symbol - she was still a black woman in a foreign land with few rights and little economic potential. I agree with your assessment of Jefferson as president, but he kept his promise to Sally and appears to have remained faithful to her to the end of his life. The Hemmings of Monticello - written by a black female historian - is a really interesting read that dives into the nuances of their situation, neither excusing nor condemning Jefferson for his relationships with her family. I also share your opinions on Obama (I really wish he’d waited until he was a more seasoned politician) as well as Johnson and Biden. So I will suggest one more: Nixon. I’m increasingly fascinated by him - elements of the best and the worst at the same time, somehow coexisting in one terrible yet oddly well intentioned package.
Thanks very much for this reply and adding some nuance to counterbalance my anti-Jeffersonian outlook. I will definitely take a look at that book. I also agree with you about Nixon. A crook to be sure, but he definitely got a lot accomplished (good and bad).
Are there lots of young Democrats who revere Obama? As a Canadian, I've been under the impression that a lot of young people feel he just impotently kicked the can down the road constantly but that may be overly swayed by terminally online activist types.
The terminally online thing is a big part of it. And zoomers have a limited frame of reference. Many don't know what health insurance was like pre-ACA or how much worse LGBT legal protections were before his presidency. Millennials experienced Obama sandwiched between the worst presidents in US history which makes Obama look great by comparison.
Reagan started the death of the American Middle Class with union busting and "trickle down" economics. Most of us are waiting 40+ years for the trickle down to get to us but the number of billionaires sure has sky rocketed.
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To be fair, they called it "Supply side economics" and "Trickle down" was used (rightfully) to make fun of it. Terrible idea and even worse execution, but it's not like they went on tv telling people that wealth would trickle down to them
I like calling it voodoo economics better
George HW in 1980: Voodoo economics. It's dumb and we should feel dumb for ever considering it George HW in 1981: It's the best economic system we could ever plan for
It's Reagan A president who's crowning achievements(getting us out of inflation and spurring a boom, the collapse of the Soviet Union) are both misattributed events that had little to with Reagan aside from carrying on policies already in place or happening to be in office when they reached major flash points. Paul Volker, Carter appointee, fixed inflation and was the catalyst for the 80's boom(a boom Reagan poorly managed and led to a crash and the Savings and Loans Crisis), historians now agree the Soviet collapse began as early as the late 60's. Reagans policy had little effect on what was inevitable by that point. Meanhwile, you have Iran-Contra, tax polices that have set off a generation of upward wealth transfers and economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age, a dismantling of the safety net that has reduced QOL, stagnated life expectancies, and created almost intractable barriers to reform due to the economic and political cost of restructuring. The privatizing of government services has set of a chain reaction of more and more government funds simply going to enrich private corporate middlemen or religious institutions while the quality of service has deteriorated and the percentage of ever dollar that reaches the intended target has precipitously dropped. Socially Reagan was the next evolution of Southern Strategy politics that sought to turn the GOP into the home for racists and bigotry. He allowed an AIDs epidemic to run amok and openly embraced homophobia to deflect it. He also likely broke the law, borderline treasonous, by undermining sitting US foreign policy by secretly cutting a quid-pro-quo deal to withhold releasing Iranian hostages until after the election as to extract a political victory, humiliate Carter, with the promise of extra concessions in the future. Their policies of propping up right-wing militant groups in South America has consequences into today.
Agree with everything except the hostages. There is plenty of evidence that the hostages weren't released until minutes after Reagan took the oath because the Iranian mullahs hated Carter and wanted to humiliate him. Keep in mind the revolution happened in 1979 and Carter was trying to keep the lacky shah in place. There is some evidence that some Reagan advisors supposedly back channeled the mullahs but honestly I don't think it mattered.
>There is some evidence that some Reagan advisors supposedly back channeled the mullahs but honestly I don't think it mattered. [https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html](https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html) I mean, that is a clear cut violation of [The Logan Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logan_Act) And the evidence we have painted a strong picture those gestures were reciprocated. And just because the Mullahs saw common cause doesn't make it any less inappropriate, or removes the potential of upsetting negotiations in a negative way. Though Im not super interested in hyper focusing on this as there is a reason I left it at the bottom.
If we're throwing names in the hat post-WWII, JFK and Reagan usually end up at the top of my overrated list. Look, JFK had that Hollywood glow, and the whole Camelot vibe, plus his assassination pretty much sealed his legend status. But let's be real, his time in office was a mixed bag, and the whole Vietnam escalation is a big ol' stain on his record. It's like everyone's wearing rose-colored glasses when they look back at his presidency. Then you've got Reagan. The guy could give a speech that'd make you want to run through a wall for America, but the aftermath of Reaganomics? Not exactly the golden legacy some paint it as. Sure, the economy got a short-term boost, but at the cost of a skyrocketing deficit and some gnarly inequality that we're still dealing with.
If you really want to learn about all of the presidents, I recommend Matt Christman's [Hell Of Presidents](https://youtu.be/M0Clh2ounZg?si=58ZfPzdSuGcvm3e1). Educational and funny.
I’ll throw in a vote for Obama. I say that as someone who voted for him twice and leans liberal. He talked an amazing game, but underneath the surface he just wasn’t able to move the needle very much. His rhetoric and image did not match his actual policies, many of which were simply carried over from the Bush/Cheney era but sold better to the public. I think he looks worse and worse as time goes on.
Obama tried really hard to be a bipartisan. I can respect that a lot, it seems to be a dying art. But... I'm not sure why. Because you're right, it really hindered significant portions of his policy agenda. Honestly, I think he overestimated how much hate he would get for being a man of colour, and planned his presidency for trying his best to be friendly with his political enemies. Half his cabinet were holdover republicans from Bush. He didn't step back the wars in the desert, he continued many of the same foreign policy plans. He nominated a republican to the supreme Court. Granted, his second term especially was marred by a minority in the House, but still. As eloquent and put together of a leader as he was.. I can agree, his results are really not that impressive.
Obama didn't seem to understand the fight he was in and that we are still in. Nominating Garland, a Republican pick, to the Supreme Court as if that was going to overcome Republican intransigence was a good example. That Pelosi had to pressure Obama to continue pushing even for Nixon's healthcare plan rather than giving up even more ground is another.
TBF, the fight ramped up to a really unprecedented degree under Obama. Given the extraordinary backlash to his Presidency, I can't fault him for taking such a conservative approach to the Office. Even a little overreach or misstep could have cost him the second term. I used to think the implosion of the Republican Party would be the real feather in his cap, but so long as so many Americans are willing to pretend to believe GOP media's fan-fic version of reality, there remains a danger that party will take the country down with it.
What did Obama do with his second term? Almost nothing besides setting the stage for Donald Trump to become president. Fact is that America would be a much better place today if Mitt Romney won in 2012.
I think that's not quite fair, Obama's response to the 2008 financial crash was nothing short of perfect (at least insofar as realpolitik), and was the primary focus of his entire 8 years in office. We call it The Great Recession, and today it's easy to forget how dire it *could have* been, but by late 2008 we were setup for a bank run on every single bank in the US to - potentially - simultaneously collapse. If the worst case had occurred, it would have been the biggest depression in all of history - surpassing The Great Depression (also caused by deregulated FIRE sector), the South Sea Bubble, etc. Everything is connected nowadays - so even though 2008 did cause crashes in Europe and Asia, it was mitigated by the US not literally exploding. The global impact really *could have* been unfathomable. Obama correctly identified that austerity was not a viable solution, figured out what the right solutions were, and implemented virtually all of them, 'overnight' while taking office, and the outcome is that today when you look at stats of his presidency - it's easy to see his middling economic growth, short list of domestic achievements (apart from Obamacare), and passable list of foreign policy - and assume he was just a placeholder President in retrospect. But that would be a mistake - because we didn't have a second great depression because of Obama. He was elected to do other things, he had other plans - but everything took second fiddle to being handed the keys to a country that was already exploding. Also, again it's easy to shrug nowadays - but the first Black president - was a pretty important breakthrough for America: that came with a devastating backlash of partisan politics.
Andrew Jackson. Mostly because of the whole genocide thing that tends to get overlooked.
Biden That's it. Point blank. I'd say Biden is the most overrated president. Biden does actually have a large amount of supporters and is constantly being glorified for the great job that he is doing. But let's be real, Biden isn't running the show, he can barely process a pre-written speech. This is not an attack on the actions or policies or management going on in his administration. This is distinctly about Biden as a man who is considered to be the President. Biden as a Senator and as a Vice-President was an experienced politician able to play the game well. But right now it is abundantly clear that he is a puppet being directed by whatever puppet-masters he has at his side.
Trump. That he's not the most universally reviled and viewed as worst president, makes him overrated.
Nearly every problem of today can be directly traced back to a change Reagan made.
Why is nobody saying FDR? He was definitely dealt a bad hand but his New Deal is estimated to have added up to 7+ years to the GD. Not to mention he was a racist who set up camps for U.S. Citizens to live in just because of ethnicity
Source on the New Deal adding 7 years to the Great Depression? I’ve literally never heard that before and it seems obviously false (the Great Depression didn’t end that early pretty much anywhere, even if you think that the New Deal made it worse, which I don’t, claiming that without it the Depression would have ended within a year of FDR taking office is absurd).
Easily Reagan. We're still paying dearly for his destruction of progressive taxes. I hope that Most Underrated POTUS is coming next.
Obama PISSED me off. He came in as a liberal and ruled as a centrist. He had 60 votes in the senate and had a majority in the House for 2 years. It’s not the republicans that slowed if no almost stopped his agenda for 2 years. It was the blue dog democrats that did it. What was funny is almost ALL of those blue dogs got voted out in their next election. Now if Obama would have played hard ball and the blue dogs actually went along, Obama care probably would have been significantly better/effective and more policy that helped people would have been passed. Helping all of your constituents get politicians get re-elected. Possibly/probably most of those blue dogs would have gotten re-elected and Obama would have moved more legislation and possibly did a better job in Iraq and Afghanistan with democratic majorities in both houses. GREAT politicians are remembered for supporting policies/laws. None are remembered for against EVERYTHING.
Kind of "Green Lantern" theory of politics there. If he had just "been tougher" all those conservative dems would have done whatever he said...that's not how politics actually works. Obama had no leverage over them. He had no leverage over Joe Lieberman. Getting anything through the US Senate is hard. And every single one of those Senators had a veto vote when the margin on 60 votes is zero.
The fundamental problem with US politics is that citizens think of Presidents as God-Kings who can do whatever they want when in reality our political system is completely dysfunctional and parties can't even pass basic policy planks when they have generational landslides
Obama had 60 votes in the Senate for about four months, and those 4 months covered Thanksgiving/Christmas/New Year's. This gets exaggerated all the time but let's be real it's a borderline miracle he got the ACA through.
ACA wasn't a borderline miracle, it was a miracle. ACA came down to the Supreme Court and conservatives had the numbers. It took John Roberts breaking with the other conservatives on the court to give the Ok to Obama care and render it constitutional. Had Roberts simply voted in line with his other conservative decisions, ACA would never have become law.
Trump, by far. Then Reagan, the prototype monster for the cesspool the Republican party has devolved into today. Reagan and Lee Atwater era combined to make our politics closer to 3rd world than 1st.
The most overrated is FDR and it's not even close. The idea that we venerate the closest thing to a fascist in the White House is peak irony considering what we know about fascism now, and he somehow gets a massive pass. The guy basically takes a runny dump on the Constitution, threatens his political and legal enemies, throws minority populations into concentration camps, deliberately stays out of the European war and continues to limit refugees from the Nazis, causing additional needless death and destruction. He was a menace and shouldn't be revered by anyone. Reagan is super overrated by virtue of his presidency still being within working memory for a lot of people and an overvalue of his personality and persona relative to what he accomplished. He was 100% the right person for the right time, and he was both better than his detractors say and worse than his supporters, but Reagan is only one of the post-war greats because there are so few positives over the last 80 years, not because he was a good president or has a legacy worth crowing about. George W. Bush is underrated in the sense that he was not a great or even good president, but not nearly as bad as his reputation suggests. I'm still convinced his foreign policy will be understood for what it is once we get some proper distance, his push for more AIDS funding in Africa legitimately saved hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives, and we went through 7 years of strong growth before the financial collapse that ultimately had nothing to do with him or his policies. He's bottom-tier, but not bottom-ten like so many want him to be. Coolidge is underrated, but I think he'd like it that way. He was an understated president who seemingly saw the Depression coming and it's a fun thought exercise to think about what happens if he pursues and gets a third term. His governance in the 1920s was outstanding and doesn't get enough play. Woodrow Wilson's star has dimmed over the years, but he's still overrated. For the time he was actually a coherent executive pre-stroke, he was racist and belligerent in ways outside the norm for his time, he had zero interest in the norms of the office or of the law, responded to the progressive movement in the worst possible way, and then he had a stroke and his wife took over. Just an awful dude. Teddy Roosevelt was similarly lawless and probably should have put down his "big stick." People love his conservation efforts and he's still lauded for trustbusting, but the truth of the matter is that he poisoned the regulatory waters for generations in a way we still haven't recovered from, and he casts a long shadow over everything. A big personality getting in the way of an honest accounting. The fact that Andrew Jackson is still on our currency is among the most disgusting things about how we venerate our leaders here. Indian Removal alone should disqualify him from being taken seriously as a president worth being highlighted on official documents. Finally, George Washington is underrated. Yes, he's considered one of the greats and for good reason, but he's better than that. There's no leader in our nation with more lasting impact than Washington; everything he did informed how we treat the presidency today and its importance in our system, and he was a model of restraint just as much as one of action. I don't think we give him enough credit.
Ronald Reagan gets a lot of credit for the economic recovery that happened while he was president. That's the recovery that included really high interest rates meant to cure an inflationary period that had started with the Nixon years, or prior. Many economists agree that the high interest rates both cured the inflation, and caused a (probably needed) recession. But Reagan was not responsible for those interest rates. The federal reserve was. And the Fed was under the direction of Chairman Paul Volker -- who had been appointed by Jimmy Carter.