BCBs Favourite Post-War US President

[The Prof]

Same at the UK Prime Minister's poll. 3 choices for the 3 Presidents that you consider to be your overall favourite*

* taking into consideration policy, success/achievement and any other categories you see fit.

[Rorschach]

Roosevelt wasn't post-war!

[Rorschach]

Roosevelt wasn't post-war!

He would have had my vote otherwise.

[Flower]

Roosevelt wasn't post-war!

He would have had my vote otherwise.

I agree on FDR.

JFK really didn't have the time to foul things up. While DDE was a great general, he left the Kennedy administration with several messes. One being Vietnam.

I remember my parents crying when Kennedy was assassinated. My parents and all my friends parents had a black framed photograph of JFK displayed in their home for many years.

[toomanyhatz]

My favorite 'person' on the list is Carter - I think he is a good man. But he was not prepared for the inevitable nasty side of the job. And when he declared on national TV after the 3-Mile Island that nuclear power was safe, you could tell he really didn't believe it himself, but the job forced him to be untruthful. It was embarrassing, and further proof that good people don't necessarily make the best presidents.

By comparison Obama was a net positive in most respects, and also basically a good man, but with just enough arrogance to make difficult decisions without being overrun by his conscience.

For all the progressive's disappointment at his lack of progressiveness, he was able to put some reforms in place - Trump has had to work harder to destroy them than he would've after a Romney presidency, certainly. Plus, while it certainly doesn't prove we've ditched racism as a culture, at least it proved we could have a more open discussion about it.

He got my vote.

[The Prof]

Roosevelt wasn't post-war!

Oops!

For some reason I thought he died after Europe but before the Japan fighting stopped.

[Rayge]

I went for Carter, Obama and Slick Willie, the last three Democrats, for pretty much the same reasons as anyone else. All the Republicans have been twits and/or shits (or, in the case of Eisenhower, a retired soldier who preferred golf to statesmanship and allowed McCarthy to run wild), Truman is forever tainted with Nagasaki, Kennedy's charisma (which I fell for hard as a teenager) has taken a battering from all the stuff that came after, LBJ did some great work with civil rights but was ruined by Viet Nam and revelations about his early life in politics.

[Samoan]

The Post-Presidency Bill Clinton and his long spoon can fuck off.

https://www.irishmirror.ie/news/irish-news/politics/bill-clinton-delivers-stirring-oration-10085884



Bill Clinton joins mourners at funeral of former IRA leader.

Martin McGuinness will be "difficult to forgive" in the eyes of many, a priest has told mourners at the former IRA leader's funeral.

[Jimbo]

Nixon, Bush and Trump.

What? They're all war criminals. And even Republican presidents get some good shit done.

[KeithPratt]

Both Carter & Obama are shining examples of the good narrative that drives what makes someone become President.

Tragically, their legacies aren't quite so great. I read a recent analysis that placed the blame on the 2008 crisis at Carter because he made such a drive to get the lower pay brackets onto the housing market, thus laying the foundation for the sub prime crisis.

Obama's is difficult to gauge right now - and there is absolutely no doubt that he had a shower of shit to deal with from day 1 that hamstrung him. The fact that he got re-elected was great, but then so did GWB and he was without doubt the worst President of the era, if only because he was a blatant puppet for the hawks.

It is one of the ironies that those who seem to be the obvious choice often turn out to be very average, whereas supposedly awful Presidents in terms of their rhetoric and character can be good ones. Who knows how Trump will be seen in 30 years time.

Nixon was an awful cunt but in the short term the dialogue with China laid the path for the end of the Cold War. In the long term that may be the seed of China's global dominance.

[Rorschach]

My favorite 'person' on the list is Carter - I think he is a good man. But he was not prepared for the inevitable nasty side of the job. And when he declared on national TV after the 3-Mile Island that nuclear power was safe, you could tell he really didn't believe it himself, but the job forced him to be untruthful. It was embarrassing, and further proof that good people don't necessarily make the best presidents.

By comparison Obama was a net positive in most respects, and also basically a good man, but with just enough arrogance to make difficult decisions without being overrun by his conscience.

For all the progressive's disappointment at his lack of progressiveness, he was able to put some reforms in place - Trump has had to work harder to destroy them than he would've after a Romney presidency, certainly. Plus, while it certainly doesn't prove we've ditched racism as a culture, at least it proved we could have a more open discussion about it.

He got my vote.

Agree with a lot of that (except that there are very strong arguments that nuclear is a lot safer than coal etc., so maybe he wasn't lying) and I voted for both of them.
I think it's wonderful that a dignified and intelligent man like Obama could get the job, despite his skin colour, but I also love that, just once, a genuinely decent human being got picked.

[Rorschach]

... LBJ did some great work with civil rights but was ruined by Viet Nam and revelations about his early life in politics.

I had a girlfriend in the 80s who actually knew about stuff like politics, books and films. I knew fuck all and, even to this day, I tend to treat her opinions as gospel. She was a big fan of LBJ because of his work on civil rights and so I am too. She's probably updated her opinion after the appearance of more information but I haven't got round to it yet.
He got my third vote but he probably shouldn't have...

[Rorschach]

Tragically, their legacies aren't quite so great. I read a recent analysis that placed the blame on the 2008 crisis at Carter because he made such a drive to get the lower pay brackets onto the housing market, thus laying the foundation for the sub prime crisis.

That seems a bit unfair! That's like blaming the crash on the people who invented money. It's not their fault how it's being used.
I have to admit that I don't know what mechanisms he was pushing to get people to buy their own houses but surely it's a perfectly reasonable goal? It's the lack of regulation and bad practices of the lenders that was the problem, rather than the goal itself, don't you think?

Obama's is difficult to gauge right now - and there is absolutely no doubt that he had a shower of shit to deal with from day 1 that hamstrung him. The fact that he got re-elected was great, but then so did GWB and he was without doubt the worst President of the era, if only because he was a blatant puppet for the hawks.

Totally agree with all of that.

[Geezee]

Roosevelt wasn't post-war!

He would have had my vote otherwise.

I agree on FDR.

JFK really didn't have the time to foul things up. While DDE was a great general, he left the Kennedy administration with several messes. One being Vietnam.

Oh i feel that Kennedy managed to foul things up at extraordinary levels considering his short time in office - one screw up after another, and I'd include Cuban Missile Crisis in that.

[Flower]

https://www.cfr.org/interview/fifty-yea ... nt-achieve

When people in this country are asked who are the greatest presidents in American history, predictably they tell you: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt. But then they add the names of John Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. So the puzzle is, why this extraordinary hold on the public? After all, Kennedy was president for only a thousand days. His domestic agenda was pretty barren. He had major initiatives: a big tax cut, a federal aid to education law, Medicare and civil rights. None of them passed during his presidency. They were all enacted by Lyndon Johnson [and] signed into law by Lyndon Johnson. Of course, in foreign policy there was the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in April 1961, after which Kennedy walked around for several days saying, "How could I have been so stupid?" He did have his great success in the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, when he faced down the Soviet leader, Nikita S. Khrushchev, without going to war. That was a major achievement of his presidency--preventing a nuclear war between the United States and the USSR. And he did have the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which was signed and approved by the Senate in October 1963, shortly before Kennedy’s assassination.

Of course, this is just one opinion.

[KeithPratt]

The argument is that by placing missiles in Turkey Kennedy created the crisis in the first place.

Presidents should never be judged on what got them elected, even if that sounds harsh on Obama.

They should be judged on their term of office. It is part of the job that they may not know what they get when they come into office. If the crisis had not happened in 2008 then maybe Obama might have had a different impact. It is how you deal with crises that shows what a good leader you are.

I see his presidency in some sense as symbolic - he showed that a black man could get the top job. But his legacy is tainted by the continuation of the wars and escalation of the deportation industry. The push to grind Russia's nose in it in the Ukraine in 2014 was also a disaster exacerbated by Obama and his foreign policy.

[The Prof]

I think luck played a large part in the Cuban missile crisis. A Russian submarine almost fired a nuclear weapon thinking war had already broken out.

Kennedy had charisma and a, sort of, relate-ability.
Not an exact science but more Democrat Presidents seem to be like this than Republicans.

[Count Machuki]

Johnson
Obama
Carter

[Geezee]

The argument is that by placing missiles in Turkey Kennedy created the crisis in the first place.

Exactly. It's a very Western narrative that Kennedy and his team showed exemplary coolness and professional decision-making capacity (the Essence of Decision is pretty much standard reading in political theory). But at least in my reading of this, it is Krushchev who deserves most if not all the credit here. Yes, in the "PR game" he was outwitted (and pretty much lost his authority as a result of not being able to advertise the concessions the Americans made) - but he was not the one bringing the world on the brink of nuclear war here, Kennedy was. To herald that as some kind of success is fairly sickening to me.

[Jimbo]

The argument is that by placing missiles in Turkey Kennedy created the crisis in the first place.

it is Krushchev who deserves most if not all the credit here.