Rating the Presidents

Another Presidential era has come and gone. So, it’s time to update my running list of post-WWII Presidents. Unfortunately, we have a new loser at the bottom of the heap. Hopefully, #44 will be better. Here’s the list:

The Relatively Good Presidents

Ronald Reagan

Good: Cut marginal tax rates by 30%. Helped defeat communism (along with Thatcher, Kohl, and the Pope). Reinvigorated our national spirit after Vietnam and Jimmy Carter. Rebuilt the military after its neglect during the Carter years.

Bad: Failed to do anything about growing government spending and debt.

Harry Truman

Good: Eliminated the war time economy to move us back to a free market, in spite of the advice of his Keynesian advisors to build tanks and bury them in the desert to keep the economy going. (Unfortunately, the Keynesian idiots are feeling their oats again today.) He also desegregated the armed forces and implemented the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe.

Mixed: Dropping of the atomic bomb to win WWII. This was seen as a successes but it is questionable at the same time.

Bad: Korean war

The Mixed Presidents

Bill Clinton

Good: Worked with the Republican Congress to balance the budget for the first time in a long time. Removed welfare from being an entitlement.

Bad: Invaded the Balkins. Failed to cement Russia in the West. Periodically sent cruise missiles to bomb Osama bin Laden, without any real plan on how to eliminate or contain him, which helped lead to 9/11.

John Kennedy

Good: Cut marginal tax rates by 30%. Compromised on missiles in Turkey for missiles in Cuba to avoid war.

Bad: Seeded the Vietnam War. Backed a coup d'etat, which installed the Baath Party (Saddam Hussein’s party) into power in Iraq.

Dwight Eisenhower

Good: Created the interstate highway system. Ended the Korean war.

Bad: Backed a coup d'etat, installing the Shah of Iran. Expanded Social Security and other New Deal programs.

The Irrelevant Presidents

Gerald Ford

Good: Vetoed more bills than most of his predecessors and successors.

Bad: The lame WIN (whip inflation now) campaign.

George Herbert Walker Bush

Bad: First Iraq war (but got out quickly). Generally clueless about the economy.

Good: Only served one term!

The Dreadful Presidents

Lyndon Johnson

Bad: Started the Vietnam War and created the Great Society entitlement programs which set the stage for the inflation of the 1970s and the entitlement mentality and deficits we are living with today.

Good: The Voting Rights Act.

Jimmy Carter

Bad: Couldn’t make a decision in a crisis (according to his own National Security Advisor) leading to American hostages in Iran and a generally failed stint as leader of the free world. Nearly destroyed the military through neglect.

Good: “Deregulated” the airlines and trucking. Appointed Paul Volcker to the Federal Reserve, who helped break the inflationary spiral of the 1970s.

Richard Nixon

Bad: Expanded Johnson’s Vietnam War and Great Society programs. Took the U.S. off of the gold standard. Imposed wage and price controls, creating shortages of everything from gasoline to toilet paper. Few remember this, but people were eating horse meat under Nixon because his price controls caused a beef shortage.

Good: Helped China enter the world community.

George Herbert Hoover Bush

Bad: Lied about Iraq’s involvement with 9/11. Iraq war. Corrupted the Constitution to spy on Americans with the Patriot Act and other legislation. Created the first new entitlement program since the Great Society. Created massive deficits and more than doubled the national debt on his watch. Quasi-nationalization of the financial sector. Largest federal intrusion into the classroom in history. Torture in Guantanamo.

Good: Letterman's Great Moments In Presidential Speeches...

Obama and the End of Two Eras

The election of Barack Obama, as President of the United States, signals the end of two long running eras.

First, his election concludes the post-civil rights era, in which race baiting politicians corrupted Martin Luther King’s message to obtain power and status for themselves. Think of Al Sharpton with his Tawana Brawley rape scam, Louis Farrakhan’s various vulgar tirades, and ex-Detroit Mayor Colman Young, who managed to stay in office for 18 years by doing nothing more than sticking his finger in whitey’s eye, in spite of the vast corruption in his administration and the tragic decline of Detroit under his watch. It is simply not credible any longer to decry the U.S. as a “racist” country now that we’ve elected an African-American to the Presidency. Those days are finally over.

Second, it buries the post-WWII conservative era. The modern conservative movement was comprised of a loose collection of economic libertarians, religious fundamentalists, big business interests, and socially conservative blue collar workers, who had greatly differing views on many key issues. They came together as a coalition under the banner of fighting communism. After the Cold War ended, some parts of this coalition started questioning the need to maintain America’s Cold War foreign policy. This potential crack in the coalition alarmed the GOP leadership, so they went looking for a new villain. During the 1990s, many on the right desperately tried to vilify “Red” China, which in many ways is more capitalistic than the U.S. 9/11 finally handed the GOP a new focus of evil in the world and for a few years it worked to keep their coalition intact. Unfortunately for them, George Bush overreached by invading Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. The GOP lost control of the Congress and now the Presidency. 20 years after the Cold War ended, the GOP’s anti-communist coalition is finally dead. It is not very likely that the GOP can revive it. Those days are also gone.

With the passing of these two eras, the election of Barack Obama positions the country to make the most radical departure with recent history we’ve seen since the Roosevelt era.

The big question is: what Obama will do with the opportunity? Will he overreach to placate the far-left’s crackpot “economic justice” agenda? Will he try to emulate the pro-business and fiscally responsible Clinton Administration? Will he parrot the crusading neo-conservatives, only this time with a focus on "democratizing" Africa, rather than the Middle East?

The other key question is what will the GOP do now? Will they return to their flaccid pre-Reagan “me too” liberalism? Will they repudiate their power hungry, big government ways of the last 8 years? Will they boot the neo-conservatives and return to their pre-WWII, non-interventionist past? Will they just drift along in chaos not knowing what to do, leaving the Democrats to control the national conversation and agenda?

In don’t think any of us know the answers to either of these questions. So, the next two years are going to be very interesting indeed.