Politics Thread

What's crazy is there's a massive amount of material that didn't make the cut.

You could do a top 1,000 for Trump and still there'd be things left on the cutting room floor.

Are we gonna finish our list of Worst Presidents — or do you have more books to read? What about Best Presidents?

Are you trying to piss off the Zoomers?

I’m a Jackson fan. Was he shithead? Yeah, and so were all the other founding fathers. You can’t judge these people by 2021 standards. FDR kept Japanese-Americans in “camps” and that was the 1940’s. Our grandparents were alive for that shit. We really gonna shit on Jackson or Jefferson who were like 100 years earlier?

Not sure how far along you are in your review of the presidents, but I'm very curious to see your rankings.

If there's one thing all of us on these boards love, it's rankings and lists and shitting on terrible authority figures. 

Here’s my list:

1. Teddy Roosevelt
2. Everyone Else

William Henry Harrison is the best president.

LBJ gets a bad rap. I’d argue he’s on par with FDR. Eisenhower is also worth a look. Fox News Republicans jizz over Reagan but they seem to favor 50’s Eisenhower. Makes no sense.

People tend to focus solely on Vietnam when it comes to LBJ, but he was actually a really strong president. A friend of mine that's a political junkie is a huge fan of his and was just talking to me about what a bad rap he got in his portrayal of Selma when LBJ was actually an ally of the Civil Rights movement. I mean, at least for an old white man with power from the south in the 1960s.

It's funny because all these MAGA idiots constantly praise Trump, talking about how he's the best president they've ever seen. Did they all forget about Reagan? I thought he was their god? 

It's been kind of a while since I read some of those books, would probably rank them something like:

1. George Washington
(set things up well and he was smart enough to listen to Hamilton a lot)

2. James Monroe
(the biography of him I read seemed a touch biased, but he seems to have been a big part of what Madison did right, and when your term is considered "the era of good feelings" that's probably a good thing.  His doctrine is more than a little imperialist, but it seems to have worked out well for the country)

3. John Adams
(The Alien and Sedition Acts were trash, but they didn't last, and he handled the quasi-war well)

4. Thomas Jefferson
(His actual presidency was relatively uneventful compared to his reputation. The Louisiana Purchase mattered, but I suspect most other people in his position would have done the same thing and he generally push the country in some regrettable directions.)

5. John Quincy Adams
(The Jimmy Carter of the early 19th Century)

6. James Madison
(Not terrible in peace time, but there's a decent argument to be made that he botched the war of 1812 and was generally weak in office)

7. John Tyler
(Throughout this I've genrally tended to reward the people who did nothing more highly than the people who succeaded at doing bad things, like...)

8. Andrew Jackson
(even if you set aside the trail of tears (which you probably shouldn't), the bank veto was dumb as hell and he bears plenty of responsibility for the panic of 1937.  Handled the nullification crisis well though.)

9. William Henry Harrison
(I mean, how am I supposed to rank this guy?  Did literally nothing during his brief time in office... which may have been for the best because he was a grade-A asshole earlier in life)

I'd probably argue for Eisenhower over LBJ.   His reputation has been somewhat hampered by boomers who view him as part and parcel with the 50s social mores they rebelled against but his civil rights record is under-rated: he exerted pressure to better desegregate the military and he also enforced the integration effort in Little Rock. He also set up the highway system and his handling of foreign policy flashpoints like the late Korean War and the Suez Crisis were masterful.  Were he in LBJ's shoes in the 60s I think he would have supported the civil rights bills but I'm not so sure he would have made the same Vietnam blunders.