I waffle on T.R. Would we go to such collective strains to define his greatness if his buddy hadn't stuck his face on a mountain alongside a few less-debatable presidential powerhouses? Early T.R. I can admire, but Bull Moose T.R. I find unsettling. Still, Bull Moose T.R. wasn't president. All the same, minus the monument, would we think of him all that much?
I think we would remember T.R. because he was a character apart from everything else. He's one of those guys who define the era for us -- big game hunter, war adventurer, political bigwig.
In terms of worst, Obama is easily the worst in my opinion. Nobody has squandered more than Barack. This man could have fixed so many of this country's problems for the long term, and he ended up a lazy bully.
BTW, let me mention this. A couple people have mentioned that the Huffpo link is frozen in time. Yeah, I know. Their feed changed, but Blogger won't let me update the feed or delete it... so we're stuck with it.
Buchanan gets prize for the worst President in my opinion, though to be fair he was simply a mediocre president in a time when we really needed more. A time that was the product of 30 years of Jacksonian Democrat dominance in our political system.
Buchanan and Pierce together (mis)handled the country during the worst periods of partisanship in our country's history. And as Buchanan left we drifted into the most violent period of our national history, the Civil War.
Speaking of "pals," that's the only reason I can see that Willa Cather is famous -- her good friend Abner Doubleday pimped her books. If you read them, you will discover that not only do they suck, but they say nothing.
Kit, Buchanan was pretty bad, but in bad times, people fail. Obama not only had the table set for him, the public was ready to fall in love with him and make changes. He could have brought the Democrats back from the left. He could have healed the racial stuff and finally put it behind us. He could have restored out leadership in the world. And even fixing the economy wasn't hard.
He blew it all. Not only that, he made every single piece of that worse and it did it arrogantly.
Celebrating Washington's Birthday I can understand. Constitution Day I can get behind. But "President´s"? Might as well be Congressman´s Day.
Andrew, Obama could have been great, but that would have required him to not be himself. I´m convinced, if given a second chance he would make more or less the same mistakes all over again.
A psychologist once told me that after the age of about 42, successful therapy becomes very difficult. Not because people cannot learn or adapt but their personality and the way they compute information is pretty much settled. Obama is a man who at 47 did not know how much he doesn´t know. By then the blinkers were firmly on. He may be relatively young for a politician but they are not coming off.
El Gordo, I agree. I think he's fundamentally flawed as a human being. I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Everything about Obama reminds me of arrogant kids out of law school. They just know that they can do everything better than everyone else even though they have no clue what it is that the profession does or even how they plan to do it. The result is kids waiting to get their butts handed to them time and again until they realize that they don't know anything. Obama reminds me of those kids, which means he's gone through decades of being a lawyer without learning yet that he doesn't know anything.
And I agree completely that if he could go back to day one, knowing everything he know now, he wouldn't change a thing because he doesn't really understand how poorly he's performed nor would he have a clue how to fix it.
In the image above, you see Grover Cleveland with (presumably) his illegitimate child. So why can´t they show Bill Clinton with a stained dress? It´s not fair.
And of course Reagan gets a movie strip motif when it should be a hammer and sickle being beaten into ploughares in front of two crossed strategic missile subs, flanked by cherubs and F-14s.
Just take consolation from the fact that Jimmy Carter's peanuts are more than appropriate when you consider that it's hard to form a visual depiction of "malaise."
And shouldn't Jefferson be seen with, I don't know, the western half of the country that he annex with the Louisiana Purchase? No offense to the artist, but he penned the Declaration before there was a country to be President of...
Hey, at least the artist is fair with Nixon. Opening up China was a huge achievement. But then it is also hard to visually express "resigning in disgrace"
Kit has sent me a link that is absolutely worth reading if you have an interest in the myth of the Nazis being efficient. It's long, but very well written and really fascinating. It debunks an amazing amount of things that I have not previously seen debunked. I highly recommend this.
When you consider that an entire industry has been named after "Teddy" Roosevelt you have to give him major points for longevity of the 'name'.
I admit that I always liked that story about him.
As I am a Canuck I don't really get a voice in today's topic... other than to say that Kennedy was my 'president' and his assassination set the meme for our generation.
Very good read, Andrew. The Nazis apparently did just about everything wrong, which somewhat helps to explain why Nazi comparisons are so easy to make in modern politics. Odds are, if your policy is in any way stupid, the Nazi's did it first.
I do remember Carter before Reagan, but my affinity for him is limited. It pretty much ends at not throwing things at the screen when I see that old a**hole.
I have no idea. Maybe the one I remember clearly the most and associate the most with my youth or life. Of course, I've only lived through 4 presidents: Bush Senior (no memory whatsoever), Clinton (Carefree childhood), Bush Junior (00s), and Obama ('nuff said).
Ford (vague knowledge of as man who pardoned a criminal), Carter (utter, utter failure.. f**ing embarrassment), Reagan (all kinds of awesome), Bush Sr. (effete loser who messed up everything Reagan gave him), Clinton I (Obama in white face), Clinton II (kind of likeable, funny and harmless), Bush W (corrupt, anti-conservative, terrorism, war), Obama (see Bush W in black face and with attitude).
AP and I the same age, and same attributes given to the respective men in the Oval Office, though I give more credit to GW Bush's navigating us through an inherited economic downturn + 9/11's effects into record weeks of consecutive job growth. Sure, he shit the bed with No Child Left Behind + the bank bailout, but he sure as hell didn't/doesn't have the disdain for this country Obama does.
Gerald Ford = better neighbor to the Simpsons than George HW Bush.
On behalf of the good citizens (a.k.a. non-Obama voters) of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania- myself included- we request that the man known only as "James Buchanan"- our state's sole entrant into the White House- never be mentioned again on the grounds that he was a loser and makes the rest of us look bad. (Just like former governor Ed Rendell.)
We would, therefore, prefer that non-Presidents William (Penn) and Ben serve as our official "faces of the state."
Eric, Disdain is the perfect word for Obama's administration. He has nothing but disdain for this country and its inhabitants.
You know, I always knew Reagan was special, but I never had a sense of just how special he was until I saw what came after him. He struck me as a very regular common sense guy, but everybody since has made him look like a magician.
"My Presidents" span Johnson to Bush. They have all been flawed men trying to do their best for all Americans mostly under extraordinary conditions of war, poverty, social unrest, triumph and tragedy and failure.. But always trying to hold the American spirit of our Founders as sacred. However Obama is a different breed and not in a good way.
Rustbelt, Ben Franklin is a great choice. Yep, Ben Franklin, our coughcoughcough President. Yep, right after coughcoughcough and before coughcoughcough.
As an aside, Colorado's political claim to fame was Mr. Monkey Business himself, Gary Hart.
Bev, I agree with that. I've never felt that any president in my lifetime didn't care deeply about our country. They may have been fools or whatever, but they wanted to do well. Until Obama. From Obama, all I get is contempt with no concern at all about the damage he does.
Well, Texas' claims have you all beat. We gave the country four Presidents and killed one...Eisenhower, Johnson, Bush 1 and Bush 2. And before you say "Eisenhower?". Yes, Eisenhower was born in Texas...
Careful, AP, that Masshole's a better Republican than almost every Dem since him.
To Texas' presidential claims, and only because Rustbelt spelled the woes of our home commonwealth's Oval Office woes, I counter with my first adopted state of Ohio's being the birthplace of eight Presidents, second only to Virginia if my Jeopardy-minded memory's to be trusted.
Dang, Andrew and Kit. That is a seriously impressive article. As an aspiring professional historian, I give it two thumbs up. (I would also put up my big toes, but I haven't mastered that.)
Two things I would add: 1. The Nazis weren't so good at reducing unemployment, either. They made some genuine progress, yes, but some of it also came from the fact that they, shall we say, discouraged a lot of people from filing unemployment claims. 2. It's fair to say the regime was that disorganized because Hitler wanted it that way. The slough of competing agencies ensured that only he, as Fuehrer, could resolve the chaos, and that it would be that much harder for a clear-cut successor/alternative/rival to emerge beneath him. Much of the scholarly debate surrounding the implementation of the Final Solution turns on just this point.
Anyway, that's a neat blog, I'll have to surf it more.
T-Rav, I was really impressed. As you say, what an impressive article. Well-researched, well-reasoned, well-written and devoid of defaults to the conventional wisdom.
One other thing to add too is that the regime also used loot to keep itself functioning. A lot of their production came from factories captured in the Czech region. Then they stole gold, food, oil, etc. as well as slave labor from all the occupied territories. It makes it a lot easier to keep a country running when you can finance it with money and assets stolen from your neighbors.
Andrew, good article. I´d like to add the nazis also failed at war production. Germany was a highly industrialized country and should have outproduced all its opponents except the US. Bureaucratic infighting and competing priorities produced very sophisticated weapons in small numbers that had little or no influence on the war. Meanwhile the air force withered away, submarines became ineffective and the army became less mechanized and ever more dependent on horses during the war. The nazis believed in a short victorious war and had no idea how to utilize mass production. In fact the Soviet Union produced more tanks and artillery in every year of the war. They did this by mobilizing the entire population, putting them to work 24/7 under appalling conditions and focusing on a small number of proven designs and incremental improvements (deliveries of US equipment notwithstanding). When the war ended, the Soviets did not have jet fighters but they had local air superiority as early as 1943.
Of course the Soviets had their own inefficiencies, beginning with a staggering waste of human lives.
The nazis failed at strategy as well. For example, take the push into the south towards the russian oilfields that produced the battle of Stalingrad. Germany could not have exploited these oilfields anyway, at least not in time. They had no oil industry that could have restored the wells!
Well, good for the world. Richard Overy wrote a fine book about the subject, Why the Allies won.
El Gordo, Agreed. I was super impressed by the article, and you're right about the military stuff. The Germans were horrible at building enough weapons and, even worse, they were horrible at making the weapons in the right numbers. For example, at one point, they had way more planes than pilots. Then they had tons of extra tanks, but no fuel. And they gave no thought to things like long range bombing, which would later prevent them from slowing the Russian industry. At every turn, they made bad choices.
Put simply, they were the exact kind of mess you expect from a socialist system.
57 comments:
The Greats: Washington, Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Reagan.
The worst of the worst: Buchanan. The country literally fell apart under him.
I waffle on T.R. Would we go to such collective strains to define his greatness if his buddy hadn't stuck his face on a mountain alongside a few less-debatable presidential powerhouses? Early T.R. I can admire, but Bull Moose T.R. I find unsettling. Still, Bull Moose T.R. wasn't president. All the same, minus the monument, would we think of him all that much?
Also, much respect for our first black president: Rutherford B. Hayes.
I think we would remember T.R. because he was a character apart from everything else. He's one of those guys who define the era for us -- big game hunter, war adventurer, political bigwig.
In terms of worst, Obama is easily the worst in my opinion. Nobody has squandered more than Barack. This man could have fixed so many of this country's problems for the long term, and he ended up a lazy bully.
I thought Clinton was the first black president?
BTW, let me mention this. A couple people have mentioned that the Huffpo link is frozen in time. Yeah, I know. Their feed changed, but Blogger won't let me update the feed or delete it... so we're stuck with it.
I guess I can go with that. Having your pal carve your mug on a mountain kinda fit the zeitgeist, I suppose.
Buchanan gets prize for the worst President in my opinion, though to be fair he was simply a mediocre president in a time when we really needed more. A time that was the product of 30 years of Jacksonian Democrat dominance in our political system.
Buchanan and Pierce together (mis)handled the country during the worst periods of partisanship in our country's history. And as Buchanan left we drifted into the most violent period of our national history, the Civil War.
I thought Lincoln was our first black President. At least he was according to a bunch of Democrats at the time.
Speaking of "pals," that's the only reason I can see that Willa Cather is famous -- her good friend Abner Doubleday pimped her books. If you read them, you will discover that not only do they suck, but they say nothing.
I liked Cather's short story "Neighbor Rosicky".
Kit, Buchanan was pretty bad, but in bad times, people fail. Obama not only had the table set for him, the public was ready to fall in love with him and make changes. He could have brought the Democrats back from the left. He could have healed the racial stuff and finally put it behind us. He could have restored out leadership in the world. And even fixing the economy wasn't hard.
He blew it all. Not only that, he made every single piece of that worse and it did it arrogantly.
Cather sucks.
My favorite has always been William Henry Harrison (1841-1841), President for 30 days 12 hours and 30 minutes. He never had time to do any harm.
Celebrating Washington's Birthday I can understand. Constitution Day I can get behind. But "President´s"? Might as well be Congressman´s Day.
Andrew, Obama could have been great, but that would have required him to not be himself. I´m convinced, if given a second chance he would make more or less the same mistakes all over again.
A psychologist once told me that after the age of about 42, successful therapy becomes very difficult. Not because people cannot learn or adapt but their personality and the way they compute information is pretty much settled. Obama is a man who at 47 did not know how much he doesn´t know. By then the blinkers were firmly on. He may be relatively young for a politician but they are not coming off.
El Gordo, I agree. I think he's fundamentally flawed as a human being. I've said it before, but it bears repeating. Everything about Obama reminds me of arrogant kids out of law school. They just know that they can do everything better than everyone else even though they have no clue what it is that the profession does or even how they plan to do it. The result is kids waiting to get their butts handed to them time and again until they realize that they don't know anything. Obama reminds me of those kids, which means he's gone through decades of being a lawyer without learning yet that he doesn't know anything.
And I agree completely that if he could go back to day one, knowing everything he know now, he wouldn't change a thing because he doesn't really understand how poorly he's performed nor would he have a clue how to fix it.
Bev, Excellent criteria for picking a best of! :)
In the image above, you see Grover Cleveland with (presumably) his illegitimate child. So why can´t they show Bill Clinton with a stained dress? It´s not fair.
And of course Reagan gets a movie strip motif when it should be a hammer and sickle being beaten into ploughares in front of two crossed strategic missile subs, flanked by cherubs and F-14s.
True. And Obama should be shown with a golf club or his wife shoving cake down her gullet. Or Obama sitting on David Axelrod's lap like a puppet.
Just take consolation from the fact that Jimmy Carter's peanuts are more than appropriate when you consider that it's hard to form a visual depiction of "malaise."
Good point. Shouldn't Truman be seen with an atomic explosion?
TR should be pictured with boxing gloves in front of a mound of dead animals.
JFK´s Apollo rocket is appropriately priapic and there´s a Demerol pill floating above it. Perfect.
LBJ? Let´s go with a napalm burst behind a housing project.
Woodrow Wilson? Fasces.
And shouldn't Jefferson be seen with, I don't know, the western half of the country that he annex with the Louisiana Purchase? No offense to the artist, but he penned the Declaration before there was a country to be President of...
Hey, at least the artist is fair with Nixon. Opening up China was a huge achievement. But then it is also hard to visually express "resigning in disgrace"
Bev, The iconic helicopter scene would work for Nixon.
El Gordo, I like that -- a napalm explosion behind a housing project! LOL!
And definitely a pile of dead animals behind TR.
A pile of dead animals. Or Yosemite or the Panama Canal or the Great White Fleet. :-)
The Great White Fleet shooting meese in the Panama Canal.
Kit has sent me a link that is absolutely worth reading if you have an interest in the myth of the Nazis being efficient. It's long, but very well written and really fascinating. It debunks an amazing amount of things that I have not previously seen debunked. I highly recommend this.
LINK
When you consider that an entire industry has been named after "Teddy" Roosevelt you have to give him major points for longevity of the 'name'.
I admit that I always liked that story about him.
As I am a Canuck I don't really get a voice in today's topic... other than to say that Kennedy was my 'president' and his assassination set the meme for our generation.
Very good read, Andrew. The Nazis apparently did just about everything wrong, which somewhat helps to explain why Nazi comparisons are so easy to make in modern politics. Odds are, if your policy is in any way stupid, the Nazi's did it first.
So Darski...you're a Canadian, eh? Can I ask you a huge favor? PLEASE KEEP YOUR WEATHER TO YOURSELF!!! ;-).
Okay now that I got that off my chest, why. No love formMillard Fillmore? He did stuff. I'm almost sure of it! And Franklin Pierce was hot!
darski, My president was Reagan and I love that! :D
Agreed about Teddy R.
tryanmax, I was impressed. It is an excellent and informative read.
Bev, I thought it was Mallard Filmore... or is that a comic strip?
My President was Bush. He was the one who I came of age during.
I must also admit some affinity for Bill Clinton. As I associate his presidency with my pre-9/11 childhood.
I do remember Carter before Reagan, but my affinity for him is limited. It pretty much ends at not throwing things at the screen when I see that old a**hole.
My Clinton memories are largely filtered through the lens of nostalgia.
On what are you basing "your President" on?
I have no idea. Maybe the one I remember clearly the most and associate the most with my youth or life. Of course, I've only lived through 4 presidents: Bush Senior (no memory whatsoever), Clinton (Carefree childhood), Bush Junior (00s), and Obama ('nuff said).
Bev, The one who was running things during the period when I think of myself growing up.
Kit, Mine go like this...
Ford (vague knowledge of as man who pardoned a criminal), Carter (utter, utter failure.. f**ing embarrassment), Reagan (all kinds of awesome), Bush Sr. (effete loser who messed up everything Reagan gave him), Clinton I (Obama in white face), Clinton II (kind of likeable, funny and harmless), Bush W (corrupt, anti-conservative, terrorism, war), Obama (see Bush W in black face and with attitude).
1 out of 7... not great odds.
AP and I the same age, and same attributes given to the respective men in the Oval Office, though I give more credit to GW Bush's navigating us through an inherited economic downturn + 9/11's effects into record weeks of consecutive job growth. Sure, he shit the bed with No Child Left Behind + the bank bailout, but he sure as hell didn't/doesn't have the disdain for this country Obama does.
Gerald Ford = better neighbor to the Simpsons than George HW Bush.
Hear ye! Hear ye!
On behalf of the good citizens (a.k.a. non-Obama voters) of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania- myself included- we request that the man known only as "James Buchanan"- our state's sole entrant into the White House- never be mentioned again on the grounds that he was a loser and makes the rest of us look bad. (Just like former governor Ed Rendell.)
We would, therefore, prefer that non-Presidents William (Penn) and Ben serve as our official "faces of the state."
Thank you.
Eric, Disdain is the perfect word for Obama's administration. He has nothing but disdain for this country and its inhabitants.
You know, I always knew Reagan was special, but I never had a sense of just how special he was until I saw what came after him. He struck me as a very regular common sense guy, but everybody since has made him look like a magician.
"My Presidents" span Johnson to Bush. They have all been flawed men trying to do their best for all Americans mostly under extraordinary conditions of war, poverty, social unrest, triumph and tragedy and failure.. But always trying to hold the American spirit of our Founders as sacred. However Obama is a different breed and not in a good way.
Rustbelt, Ben Franklin is a great choice. Yep, Ben Franklin, our coughcoughcough President. Yep, right after coughcoughcough and before coughcoughcough.
As an aside, Colorado's political claim to fame was Mr. Monkey Business himself, Gary Hart.
Bev, I agree with that. I've never felt that any president in my lifetime didn't care deeply about our country. They may have been fools or whatever, but they wanted to do well. Until Obama. From Obama, all I get is contempt with no concern at all about the damage he does.
Well, Texas' claims have you all beat. We gave the country four Presidents and killed one...Eisenhower, Johnson, Bush 1 and Bush 2. And before you say "Eisenhower?". Yes, Eisenhower was born in Texas...
Uh hmm. You haven't exactly given us your best have you? I'd trade them all for a President Tom Landry.
As for killing the one, I guess since you've given four, it's ok to take one back now and then. Besides, he was a Masshole.
Careful, AP, that Masshole's a better Republican than almost every Dem since him.
To Texas' presidential claims, and only because Rustbelt spelled the woes of our home commonwealth's Oval Office woes, I counter with my first adopted state of Ohio's being the birthplace of eight Presidents, second only to Virginia if my Jeopardy-minded memory's to be trusted.
Dang, Andrew and Kit. That is a seriously impressive article. As an aspiring professional historian, I give it two thumbs up. (I would also put up my big toes, but I haven't mastered that.)
Two things I would add: 1. The Nazis weren't so good at reducing unemployment, either. They made some genuine progress, yes, but some of it also came from the fact that they, shall we say, discouraged a lot of people from filing unemployment claims. 2. It's fair to say the regime was that disorganized because Hitler wanted it that way. The slough of competing agencies ensured that only he, as Fuehrer, could resolve the chaos, and that it would be that much harder for a clear-cut successor/alternative/rival to emerge beneath him. Much of the scholarly debate surrounding the implementation of the Final Solution turns on just this point.
Anyway, that's a neat blog, I'll have to surf it more.
T-Rav, I was really impressed. As you say, what an impressive article. Well-researched, well-reasoned, well-written and devoid of defaults to the conventional wisdom.
One other thing to add too is that the regime also used loot to keep itself functioning. A lot of their production came from factories captured in the Czech region. Then they stole gold, food, oil, etc. as well as slave labor from all the occupied territories. It makes it a lot easier to keep a country running when you can finance it with money and assets stolen from your neighbors.
Eric, Very true. He was even better than some of the Republicans... Nixon in particular.
In terms of sheer numbers, just wait until Guam starts their string. They're going for 20 in a row!
"...spelled the woes of our Oval Office woes ... "? Yeah, I real edu-ma-cated sentence that one. Ugh.
"Excuse me, Mr. President, in the dictionary under 'redundant' it says, 'See, redundant.'"
ROBIN WILLIAMS
Andrew, good article. I´d like to add the nazis also failed at war production. Germany was a highly industrialized country and should have outproduced all its opponents except the US. Bureaucratic infighting and competing priorities produced very sophisticated weapons in small numbers that had little or no influence on the war. Meanwhile the air force withered away, submarines became ineffective and the army became less mechanized and ever more dependent on horses during the war. The nazis believed in a short victorious war and had no idea how to utilize mass production.
In fact the Soviet Union produced more tanks and artillery in every year of the war. They did this by mobilizing the entire population, putting them to work 24/7 under appalling conditions and focusing on a small number of proven designs and incremental improvements (deliveries of US equipment notwithstanding). When the war ended, the Soviets did not have jet fighters but they had local air superiority as early as 1943.
Of course the Soviets had their own inefficiencies, beginning with a staggering waste of human lives.
The nazis failed at strategy as well. For example, take the push into the south towards the russian oilfields that produced the battle of Stalingrad. Germany could not have exploited these oilfields anyway, at least not in time. They had no oil industry that could have restored the wells!
Well, good for the world. Richard Overy wrote a fine book about the subject, Why the Allies won.
El Gordo, Agreed. I was super impressed by the article, and you're right about the military stuff. The Germans were horrible at building enough weapons and, even worse, they were horrible at making the weapons in the right numbers. For example, at one point, they had way more planes than pilots. Then they had tons of extra tanks, but no fuel. And they gave no thought to things like long range bombing, which would later prevent them from slowing the Russian industry. At every turn, they made bad choices.
Put simply, they were the exact kind of mess you expect from a socialist system.
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