Wrong Element
Sentient Onion
- Joined
- May 5, 2002
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Just as a fun exercise — because I find both American history and ranking things to be enjoyable — I am presenting my list of the American presidents, from best to worst.
44 different men have served as president, with Grover Cleveland counting as two separate people because he was just that awesome. I am only ranking 42 of them, reasoning that William Henry Harrison literally didn't do anything in office other than speak too long at his inaugural and become fatally ill as a result, and James Garfield was only president for four months before getting shot (he lingered for weeks after that as a human Petri dish for his "surgeons").
I don't take this ranking especially seriously, though all of you should. If you asked me again next week, I'd probably have a slightly different order. And outside of the extremes, I don't have very strong opinions on the actual placings. In other words, I am comfortable in saying that Lincoln was a superior president to Coolidge, but I'm not firm in believing which of the John Adamses was the better president.
And if you call this list "biased," you're a dumbass. Of course it is; it's my opinion. Feel free to disagree, although you will be wrong.
Here now, the list.
1. Washington: I put him first because so much of what followed proceeded from his example. What would have become of the country if Washington had simply decided he was going to keep being president till he died? Because he totally could have made that happen.
2. Lincoln: Took the weakest mandate imaginable (he won about 40 percent of the vote in a 4-person race, and then half the country left after he won) and decided the Union was worth saving. There's no question that his assassination and the subsequent refusal to get the South to appreciate it had lost is the biggest negative "what if' in American history.
3. F.D. Roosevelt: Rallying the American people behind the New Deal was leadership at its finest, and having saved the country in his first eight years, he figured he'd try and save the world next. A fairly shallow, sheltered, and VERY spoiled rich kid who became a giant.
4. Truman: Leading the U.S. into the postwar world was a massive undertaking that Truman mostly pulled off despite his provincial background. A man with no college education who seemed destined to be a nobody at age 40, his life is proof that leaders can be found in the oddest places.
5. T. Roosevelt: The first president to be a "media figure" in the modern sense of the word, and he used that as a means of investing power in the office in a way that would have stunned most earlier presidents. This makes him highly consequential, even though separating hype from accomplishment with him is not always easy.
6. Eisenhower: A fine administrator (a key reason he rose in the Army between the wars), he gave America the pause from history it wanted in the 1950s. He wasn't perfect by any stretch; he didn't really want the government doing much (though he reconciled the GOP to the New Deal). The only postwar president who ever called out the military-industrial complex, a term he invented.
7. Monroe: The president 200 years ago, his eight years were the "Era of Good Feelings," so called because the first party system had broken down and he basically governed without opposition (spoiler: it didn't last). Very able; certainly the least appreciated of the two-term presidents.
8. Kennedy: Probably preserved his rep by dying young, because I don't care what Oliver Stone thinks, JFK almost certainly would have gotten us deeper into Vietnam eventually. A lot of the pent-up domestic energy of the era would have to wait for his successor, but Kennedy kicked the race to the moon into high gear, and pulled off the Cuban Missile Crisis without getting us all killed.
9. Jefferson: An extremely complex figure — I assume everyone knows why, and we'll leave it at that. His record as president was on the whole not great, though he did pull off the masterstroke of the Louisiana Purchase, something many of his supporters thought the federal government had no right to do.
10. Obama: One of the best ever at the bully pulpit, he prevented a second Great Depression and improved access to health care; and the mere fact of his election, when he was a second-class citizen at birth, is one of the more miraculous events in American history. His biggest negative is that he didn't care much about the more overly political parts of the job, and his party suffered from the neglect.
11. Polk: He's usually the highest-rated of the one-term presidents, though his reputation has suffered as the morality of Manifest Destiny and his trumped-up war against Mexico have become more widely debated.
12. Cleveland: The only Democratic president between Lincoln and Wilson got that way by going along with the prevailing pro-business attitudes of the time. His second term was really rough, including a massive recession.
13. J. Adams: Traditionally looked down on because 1) he was the only early president who wasn't reelected, 2) the hideousness of the Alien and Sedition Acts; and 3) he was sort of a jerk. His primary contribution was establishing a tradition of a defeated president leaving office without complaint, which has held up so far (knock wood).
14. Wilson: The first Democratic president after Jackson to get reelected, his reputation has taken a hit of late due to his racism (not that he was especially unusual among presidents of the era in that regard), and because his last two years (the failure of the League of Nations, the Red Scare, his stroke) were about as bad as can be. He was self-righteous to a fault. But he was fairly good on domestic policy, and he basically wrote the book on how to coax a reluctant country into an overseas war.
15. Clinton: His economic record is the strongest of any recent president, and he made the Democrats nationally competitive again after a 20-year stretch where they were blown out in every election except for the one post-Watergate. But while his impeachment was titanically stupid, he handed his enemies the rope, and as a result he was replaced by Dubya, with all sorts of dramatic impacts.
16. Taft: Also known as the other president buried at Arlington. He has always suffered by comparison to Teddy Roosevelt, the more colorful mentor who turned on him with a vengeance. As conservatives of the era go, he was less objectionable than most; he would have been a better president if he had been more of a political animal.
17. Madison: In retrospect, the country was pretty fortunate to survive the War of 1812; this wasn't Madison's idea alone but he was the president for it. Basically, his 18th Century contributions topped his 19th. Another slave owner, of course.
18. B. Harrison: The presidency as an institution was not very strong in the late 19th century; that fact and Harrison's generally being honest and moderate (he was the last president who was decent on the rights of black people till FDR) limited his impact.
19. Arthur: A pure machine hack who never ran for office before winding up as Garfield's veep, he pushed for civil service reform in the wake of Garfield's assassination, one of the more consequential acts of any late 19th century president. Had wonderful sideburns, of course.
20. J.Q. Adams: He's spent 200 years living in the shadow of his father and Andrew Jackson. The way he won in 1824 was so controversial it kept him from getting much accomplished in office despite him having some solid ideas. He'll have to settle for being probably the greatest diplomat in American history.
21. L. Johnson: Almost every political reporter of the mid-20th century said he was the most interesting person they ever covered, and it's easy to believe. He was crude and casually corrupt in the way Texas pols have always been, and while most politicians of the era would have done exactly as he did in Vietnam, the bottom line is it was his policy. But Medicare and the Civil Rights Act make him the most consequential president of the postwar era on domestic policy, and it isn't close.
22. Bush I: He probably would have been better suited to an earlier era of American politics, when it was common to become president by just working your way up the party ladder rather than by appealing to voters and crass stuff like that. Renowned for his decency, and yet ran a truly vapid and sleazy campaign in 1988.
23. Jackson: Traditionally regarded as a "Great President" because historians have a bias towards activism and he was nothing if not activist, but the first Man of the People to get elected was also a purveyor of genocide, a believer in violence for its own sake, and clearly psychologically unstable (it's no wonder Trump, who knows nothing about American history, is a huge fan). Get his crazy ass off the $20 already.
24. Carter: Anyone who was president in the late 1970s was going to be playing an almost impossibly weak hand. Carter made his situation worse by not having the political skill to sell his (actually decent) ideas, and Congress never really trusted him. His Egypt-Israel peace deal was a stellar piece of negotiation, and of course he's one of the few recent ex-presidents to not be a total embarrassment.
25. Reagan: The two things he did well: hiring a good staff to take care of the boring detail work, and being flexible enough to recognize the opportunity offered by Gorbachev despite a lifetime of Cold War nonsense. Mostly he was badly overrated, kicking off the era of coddling the rich that has pretty much bankrupted the government, ignoring AIDS, and presiding over the impeachment-worthy Iran-Contra Affair. Clearly senile in his second term.
26. Van Buren: Political infighter who gets much of the credit for building the Democratic Party, he had the bad luck to become president right when one of the great 19th Century "panics" struck. Rocked the bald look fairly well.
27. Grant: His heart was mostly in the right place during his two terms, but he never had very sure footing outside the battlefield and was easily pushed around by the tycoons of the day and their supporters in his administration. Obviously a great man and indispensable in saving the Union.
28. McKinley: A transitional figure in the White House (first president of the 20th century, the last to have served in the Civil War), McKinley was basically a standard issue Gilded Age Republican, with the added bonus of an imperialist war against Spain.
29. Coolidge: Hard to believe that someone this dull and averse to giving speeches could have become president in the Roaring Twenties, but it's now the 2020s and it looks like Biden is coming in, so go figure. Another pro-business mediocrity who would have done nothing to stop the drive towards eventual depression even if he had realized it was happening. Reagan, who was a teenager during his presidency, was a big admirer.
30. Ford: Had one important job to do as Nixon's successor — restore decency to the White House — and basically managed that. But Ford, like most Midwestern conservatives, really didn't want the government to do much, and the one big thing he did do, pardon Nixon, is among the more inexcusable acts of any president.
31. Hayes: Was basically willing to sell out Reconstruction in order to win the presidency in the very screwed up election year of 1876. His main contribution to history, of course, was helping to found THE Ohio State University.
32. Taylor: A general with no real political views, Taylor was interesting in that he was a slave-owning Southerner who nonetheless was eager to not throw gasoline on the fire of the slavery issue. A strong unionist like Jackson, he never would have supported secession had he lived that long, but of course he didn't even survive to the halfway point of his term.
33. Fillmore: A weakling who became the last Whig president when he succeeded Taylor; the regional split in the country and its politics dramatically widened in his 2 1/2 years on the job. Ran for president again in 1856 as head of the anti-immigrant "Know Nothings" and did badly enough to allow the new Republicans to become the second major party.
34. Hoover: A very interesting guy in many ways, he had the bad luck to come to power at the outset of the Depression, something his ideology and his personal history as a self-made man simply didn't equip him to handle. He then spent his long ex-presidency as a bitter crank, never appreciating the reason he blew it.
35. Harding: After the turmoil of Wilson, Harding was more than happy to fulfill a national desire for a boring pro-business conservative (though Harding wasn't exactly boring in his personal life). His main weakness was that he was dumb and gave his crooked buddies the run of the government.
36. Tyler: As the first vice president to ascend to the presidency, he had trouble being seen as legitimate, and the fact that no one liked him didn't help. Possibly the most aggressive defender of slavery to serve as president, he died as a member of the Confederate Congress.
37. Pierce: A New Englander with a fondness for slavery, which I guess is what you needed to win the Democratic nomination in 1852. A drunk and all-around lousy human being who did nothing to stop the slide toward civil war and probably didn't want to.
38. Nixon: Savvy enough to agree to some big government reforms at the tail end of the era where that sort of thing was popular, his paranoia led him into the morass of Watergate. For some reason, history has mostly forgiven him for sabotaging Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and then waging the stupid war for another four years. Massive weirdo.
39. Bush II: Total mediocrity who almost certainly would never have thought of a life in politics if his name hadn't been George Bush, he inherited peace and prosperity and left the country in an Iraqi quagmire and brutal near-depression. In between was the disgrace of the Katrina response. The second worst Republican president of the century, and of all time.
40. A. Johnson: The country has been lucky repeatedly throughout its history, but having this jackass "War Democrat" as the successor to Lincoln was one of the real strokes of non-luck. Any possibility of the country healing in a responsible way after the war was a pipe dream thanks to him.
41. Buchanan: Another pro-slavery northerner (and curiously, the only Pennsylvanian to become president), Buchanan did absolutely nothing to prevent the approaching war, even when open treason was being committed at the end of his term.
42. Trump: Warren Harding was a very bad president, but he was better than this guy in two respects: 1) While both were very stupid, Harding at least realized this about himself while Trump thinks he's brilliant; and 2) Harding outsourced his corruption while Trump's personal corruption is at a level never before contemplated in a president. Also, the main casualty of the Harding presidency was Harding himself: one rather than 225,000.
44 different men have served as president, with Grover Cleveland counting as two separate people because he was just that awesome. I am only ranking 42 of them, reasoning that William Henry Harrison literally didn't do anything in office other than speak too long at his inaugural and become fatally ill as a result, and James Garfield was only president for four months before getting shot (he lingered for weeks after that as a human Petri dish for his "surgeons").
I don't take this ranking especially seriously, though all of you should. If you asked me again next week, I'd probably have a slightly different order. And outside of the extremes, I don't have very strong opinions on the actual placings. In other words, I am comfortable in saying that Lincoln was a superior president to Coolidge, but I'm not firm in believing which of the John Adamses was the better president.
And if you call this list "biased," you're a dumbass. Of course it is; it's my opinion. Feel free to disagree, although you will be wrong.
Here now, the list.
1. Washington: I put him first because so much of what followed proceeded from his example. What would have become of the country if Washington had simply decided he was going to keep being president till he died? Because he totally could have made that happen.
2. Lincoln: Took the weakest mandate imaginable (he won about 40 percent of the vote in a 4-person race, and then half the country left after he won) and decided the Union was worth saving. There's no question that his assassination and the subsequent refusal to get the South to appreciate it had lost is the biggest negative "what if' in American history.
3. F.D. Roosevelt: Rallying the American people behind the New Deal was leadership at its finest, and having saved the country in his first eight years, he figured he'd try and save the world next. A fairly shallow, sheltered, and VERY spoiled rich kid who became a giant.
4. Truman: Leading the U.S. into the postwar world was a massive undertaking that Truman mostly pulled off despite his provincial background. A man with no college education who seemed destined to be a nobody at age 40, his life is proof that leaders can be found in the oddest places.
5. T. Roosevelt: The first president to be a "media figure" in the modern sense of the word, and he used that as a means of investing power in the office in a way that would have stunned most earlier presidents. This makes him highly consequential, even though separating hype from accomplishment with him is not always easy.
6. Eisenhower: A fine administrator (a key reason he rose in the Army between the wars), he gave America the pause from history it wanted in the 1950s. He wasn't perfect by any stretch; he didn't really want the government doing much (though he reconciled the GOP to the New Deal). The only postwar president who ever called out the military-industrial complex, a term he invented.
7. Monroe: The president 200 years ago, his eight years were the "Era of Good Feelings," so called because the first party system had broken down and he basically governed without opposition (spoiler: it didn't last). Very able; certainly the least appreciated of the two-term presidents.
8. Kennedy: Probably preserved his rep by dying young, because I don't care what Oliver Stone thinks, JFK almost certainly would have gotten us deeper into Vietnam eventually. A lot of the pent-up domestic energy of the era would have to wait for his successor, but Kennedy kicked the race to the moon into high gear, and pulled off the Cuban Missile Crisis without getting us all killed.
9. Jefferson: An extremely complex figure — I assume everyone knows why, and we'll leave it at that. His record as president was on the whole not great, though he did pull off the masterstroke of the Louisiana Purchase, something many of his supporters thought the federal government had no right to do.
10. Obama: One of the best ever at the bully pulpit, he prevented a second Great Depression and improved access to health care; and the mere fact of his election, when he was a second-class citizen at birth, is one of the more miraculous events in American history. His biggest negative is that he didn't care much about the more overly political parts of the job, and his party suffered from the neglect.
11. Polk: He's usually the highest-rated of the one-term presidents, though his reputation has suffered as the morality of Manifest Destiny and his trumped-up war against Mexico have become more widely debated.
12. Cleveland: The only Democratic president between Lincoln and Wilson got that way by going along with the prevailing pro-business attitudes of the time. His second term was really rough, including a massive recession.
13. J. Adams: Traditionally looked down on because 1) he was the only early president who wasn't reelected, 2) the hideousness of the Alien and Sedition Acts; and 3) he was sort of a jerk. His primary contribution was establishing a tradition of a defeated president leaving office without complaint, which has held up so far (knock wood).
14. Wilson: The first Democratic president after Jackson to get reelected, his reputation has taken a hit of late due to his racism (not that he was especially unusual among presidents of the era in that regard), and because his last two years (the failure of the League of Nations, the Red Scare, his stroke) were about as bad as can be. He was self-righteous to a fault. But he was fairly good on domestic policy, and he basically wrote the book on how to coax a reluctant country into an overseas war.
15. Clinton: His economic record is the strongest of any recent president, and he made the Democrats nationally competitive again after a 20-year stretch where they were blown out in every election except for the one post-Watergate. But while his impeachment was titanically stupid, he handed his enemies the rope, and as a result he was replaced by Dubya, with all sorts of dramatic impacts.
16. Taft: Also known as the other president buried at Arlington. He has always suffered by comparison to Teddy Roosevelt, the more colorful mentor who turned on him with a vengeance. As conservatives of the era go, he was less objectionable than most; he would have been a better president if he had been more of a political animal.
17. Madison: In retrospect, the country was pretty fortunate to survive the War of 1812; this wasn't Madison's idea alone but he was the president for it. Basically, his 18th Century contributions topped his 19th. Another slave owner, of course.
18. B. Harrison: The presidency as an institution was not very strong in the late 19th century; that fact and Harrison's generally being honest and moderate (he was the last president who was decent on the rights of black people till FDR) limited his impact.
19. Arthur: A pure machine hack who never ran for office before winding up as Garfield's veep, he pushed for civil service reform in the wake of Garfield's assassination, one of the more consequential acts of any late 19th century president. Had wonderful sideburns, of course.
20. J.Q. Adams: He's spent 200 years living in the shadow of his father and Andrew Jackson. The way he won in 1824 was so controversial it kept him from getting much accomplished in office despite him having some solid ideas. He'll have to settle for being probably the greatest diplomat in American history.
21. L. Johnson: Almost every political reporter of the mid-20th century said he was the most interesting person they ever covered, and it's easy to believe. He was crude and casually corrupt in the way Texas pols have always been, and while most politicians of the era would have done exactly as he did in Vietnam, the bottom line is it was his policy. But Medicare and the Civil Rights Act make him the most consequential president of the postwar era on domestic policy, and it isn't close.
22. Bush I: He probably would have been better suited to an earlier era of American politics, when it was common to become president by just working your way up the party ladder rather than by appealing to voters and crass stuff like that. Renowned for his decency, and yet ran a truly vapid and sleazy campaign in 1988.
23. Jackson: Traditionally regarded as a "Great President" because historians have a bias towards activism and he was nothing if not activist, but the first Man of the People to get elected was also a purveyor of genocide, a believer in violence for its own sake, and clearly psychologically unstable (it's no wonder Trump, who knows nothing about American history, is a huge fan). Get his crazy ass off the $20 already.
24. Carter: Anyone who was president in the late 1970s was going to be playing an almost impossibly weak hand. Carter made his situation worse by not having the political skill to sell his (actually decent) ideas, and Congress never really trusted him. His Egypt-Israel peace deal was a stellar piece of negotiation, and of course he's one of the few recent ex-presidents to not be a total embarrassment.
25. Reagan: The two things he did well: hiring a good staff to take care of the boring detail work, and being flexible enough to recognize the opportunity offered by Gorbachev despite a lifetime of Cold War nonsense. Mostly he was badly overrated, kicking off the era of coddling the rich that has pretty much bankrupted the government, ignoring AIDS, and presiding over the impeachment-worthy Iran-Contra Affair. Clearly senile in his second term.
26. Van Buren: Political infighter who gets much of the credit for building the Democratic Party, he had the bad luck to become president right when one of the great 19th Century "panics" struck. Rocked the bald look fairly well.
27. Grant: His heart was mostly in the right place during his two terms, but he never had very sure footing outside the battlefield and was easily pushed around by the tycoons of the day and their supporters in his administration. Obviously a great man and indispensable in saving the Union.
28. McKinley: A transitional figure in the White House (first president of the 20th century, the last to have served in the Civil War), McKinley was basically a standard issue Gilded Age Republican, with the added bonus of an imperialist war against Spain.
29. Coolidge: Hard to believe that someone this dull and averse to giving speeches could have become president in the Roaring Twenties, but it's now the 2020s and it looks like Biden is coming in, so go figure. Another pro-business mediocrity who would have done nothing to stop the drive towards eventual depression even if he had realized it was happening. Reagan, who was a teenager during his presidency, was a big admirer.
30. Ford: Had one important job to do as Nixon's successor — restore decency to the White House — and basically managed that. But Ford, like most Midwestern conservatives, really didn't want the government to do much, and the one big thing he did do, pardon Nixon, is among the more inexcusable acts of any president.
31. Hayes: Was basically willing to sell out Reconstruction in order to win the presidency in the very screwed up election year of 1876. His main contribution to history, of course, was helping to found THE Ohio State University.
32. Taylor: A general with no real political views, Taylor was interesting in that he was a slave-owning Southerner who nonetheless was eager to not throw gasoline on the fire of the slavery issue. A strong unionist like Jackson, he never would have supported secession had he lived that long, but of course he didn't even survive to the halfway point of his term.
33. Fillmore: A weakling who became the last Whig president when he succeeded Taylor; the regional split in the country and its politics dramatically widened in his 2 1/2 years on the job. Ran for president again in 1856 as head of the anti-immigrant "Know Nothings" and did badly enough to allow the new Republicans to become the second major party.
34. Hoover: A very interesting guy in many ways, he had the bad luck to come to power at the outset of the Depression, something his ideology and his personal history as a self-made man simply didn't equip him to handle. He then spent his long ex-presidency as a bitter crank, never appreciating the reason he blew it.
35. Harding: After the turmoil of Wilson, Harding was more than happy to fulfill a national desire for a boring pro-business conservative (though Harding wasn't exactly boring in his personal life). His main weakness was that he was dumb and gave his crooked buddies the run of the government.
36. Tyler: As the first vice president to ascend to the presidency, he had trouble being seen as legitimate, and the fact that no one liked him didn't help. Possibly the most aggressive defender of slavery to serve as president, he died as a member of the Confederate Congress.
37. Pierce: A New Englander with a fondness for slavery, which I guess is what you needed to win the Democratic nomination in 1852. A drunk and all-around lousy human being who did nothing to stop the slide toward civil war and probably didn't want to.
38. Nixon: Savvy enough to agree to some big government reforms at the tail end of the era where that sort of thing was popular, his paranoia led him into the morass of Watergate. For some reason, history has mostly forgiven him for sabotaging Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and then waging the stupid war for another four years. Massive weirdo.
39. Bush II: Total mediocrity who almost certainly would never have thought of a life in politics if his name hadn't been George Bush, he inherited peace and prosperity and left the country in an Iraqi quagmire and brutal near-depression. In between was the disgrace of the Katrina response. The second worst Republican president of the century, and of all time.
40. A. Johnson: The country has been lucky repeatedly throughout its history, but having this jackass "War Democrat" as the successor to Lincoln was one of the real strokes of non-luck. Any possibility of the country healing in a responsible way after the war was a pipe dream thanks to him.
41. Buchanan: Another pro-slavery northerner (and curiously, the only Pennsylvanian to become president), Buchanan did absolutely nothing to prevent the approaching war, even when open treason was being committed at the end of his term.
42. Trump: Warren Harding was a very bad president, but he was better than this guy in two respects: 1) While both were very stupid, Harding at least realized this about himself while Trump thinks he's brilliant; and 2) Harding outsourced his corruption while Trump's personal corruption is at a level never before contemplated in a president. Also, the main casualty of the Harding presidency was Harding himself: one rather than 225,000.
