Board 8 > Who is widely considered to be the 4th best US president?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Is it even fair to rank WHH?
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Eddv posted...

Bottom 10 sure.

1. Buchanan
2. Pearce
3. Fillmore
4. Taylor (mostly for dying and inflicting Fillmore on us)
5. Andrew Johnson
6. Tyler
7. Polk
8. Harding (first truly bad president to not be directly related to slavery/civil war related failures)
9. Hayes (that didn't last long)
10. Hoover probably

Nixon is interesting in that I can make a convincing case for both top and bottom 10 for him and be right each time.

Fuck you Nixon.

If Trump left office today, where would he land?
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Eddv posted...

Much like Arthur he tends to get forgotten because he turned his back on his own party and democrats sure as hell weren't gonna lionize him.

I already kinda hinted at this before but I really hate the historical rankings because it's so clear that they're unable to see past like, surface-level big accomplishments and that they're deeply influenced by whose presidential legacies have been preserved and canonized by their contemporaries of the day and whose legacies have been forgotten because they did things that were good but unpopular at the time. I'm really baffled by those who are unable to see Garfield/Arthur as anything more than #25-30 tier, like, jfc, these guys read history right? what the hell

The best and most obvious way to settle this is with a bracket tournament.
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John Tyler literally declared himself President and congress just said fuck it and let him set the precedent.
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BetrayedTangy posted...

The best and most obvious way to settle this is with a bracket tournament.

But the bracket tournament results are not determined by popular vote, but based on Electoral College vote distribution by state
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Eddv posted...

Bottom 10 sure.

1. Buchanan
2. Pearce
3. Fillmore
4. Taylor (mostly for dying and inflicting Fillmore on us)
5. Andrew Johnson
6. Tyler
7. Polk
8. Harding (first truly bad president to not be directly related to slavery/civil war related failures)
9. Hayes (that didn't last long)
10. Hoover probably

Nixon is interesting in that I can make a convincing case for both top and bottom 10 for him and be right each time.

Fuck you Nixon.

I assume you're not including sitting presidents in this list

Although to be clear I could quite honestly see an argument for Trump as not the #1 worst just because the pre-civil war dudes were THAT fucking bad

Also wait did I just see Polk in a bottom 10?
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1. Ric Flair
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Underleveled posted...

Also wait did I just see Polk in a bottom 10?

You cannot use the Mexican War as an accomplishment without somehow squaring with it as a proximate cause of the Civil War.

I cannot and treat him as what he is - the reckless instigator of the territorial crises that caused the civil war.

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As for Trump he's looking sub-Harding but its too early to tell if he can still down past these antebellum guys and Johnson.

Leaving office today and allowing that the major damage he is inflicting on the western order is probably still reversible would keep him up further.

The longer he is in office and the more the damage he is doing to things like NATO, the more ascendant Russia and China are allowed to become unchecked the worse his stock will fall as the damage he will have done to our nation will be on that level.
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Paratroopa1 posted...

Although to be clear I could quite honestly see an argument for Trump as not the #1 worst just because the pre-civil war dudes were THAT fucking bad

Im not a historian, but I took AP US Government, and I agree

It would be pretty tough for any modern President to match the absolute worst.

I still think that, if he left office right now, you could still make a historical case that W was worse
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I have a new found respect for president Arthur now.
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__LeiaRolando__ posted...

FDR is not top 3 due to his attempts to rig the Supreme Court in his favor, interning the Japanese, ignore the traditional rules of two terms, and mismanaging the Depression. Obama is not top 10 and only polls so well because of recency bias and idiots not knowing history - his first term was full of scandals and he divided the country. Jackson was an asshole who did the closest thing to genocide America has ever seen.

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Ike, and Reagan are probably the top 5. Yes, Ike. Reagan is for his foreign policy alone - he was one of the prominent figures in the collapse of the USSR. Teddy is probably 6th.

Huh, interesting trivia. I never knew of Eisenhower that loved.
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Jakyl25 posted...

Paratroopa1 posted...

Although to be clear I could quite honestly see an argument for Trump as not the #1 worst just because the pre-civil war dudes were THAT fucking bad

Im not a historian, but I took AP US Government, and I agree

It would be pretty tough for any modern President to match the absolute worst.

I still think that, if he left office right now, you could still make a historical case that W was worse

It really really depends on the long term effects of his wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

If Vietnam had somehow been a rousing success LBJ would be a lock for like #2 .
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If you don't think Washington is objectively top 3 you're pretty dumb.
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Do people who dislike Bush consider PEPFAR when evaluating him?

Jakyl25 posted...

Paratroopa1 posted...

Although to be clear I could quite honestly see an argument for Trump as not the #1 worst just because the pre-civil war dudes were THAT fucking bad

Im not a historian, but I took AP US Government, and I agree

It would be pretty tough for any modern President to match the absolute worst.

I still think that, if he left office right now, you could still make a historical case that W was worse

The way I look at it is this: consider replacing a given President with a generic semi-competent person of the same party, surrounded by standard political/career government operatives, facing all the same situations as the actual president. How does that generic person compare? Trump is the only president I am extremely confident would be an unambiguous downgrade along any axis to that generic person. Everything Trump-specific is bad.

Alternatively, consider timewarping Trump into a more consequential time period (pre-civil war, during one of the major wars, whatever). Would he have done a better job than the actual president? (I really doubt it)
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Oh god, imagine if Trump was in Buchanans slot

Wed all have mandatory slavery
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I went to read more on Buchanan after he got ranked the worst

From Wikipedia:

The day before his death, Buchanan predicted that "history will vindicate my memory".[110]

Whoops
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LordoftheMorons posted...

Jakyl25 posted...

Paratroopa1 posted...

Although to be clear I could quite honestly see an argument for Trump as not the #1 worst just because the pre-civil war dudes were THAT fucking bad

Im not a historian, but I took AP US Government, and I agree

It would be pretty tough for any modern President to match the absolute worst.

I still think that, if he left office right now, you could still make a historical case that W was worse

The way I look at it is this: consider replacing a given President with a generic semi-competent person of the same party, surrounded by standard political/career government operatives, facing all the same situations as the actual president. How does that generic person compare? Trump is the only president I am extremely confident would be an unambiguous downgrade along any axis to that generic person. Everything Trump-specific is bad.

Alternatively, consider timewarping Trump into a more consequential time period (pre-civil war, during one of the major wars, whatever). Would he have done a better job than the actual president? (I really doubt it)

Ahh the Wins Above Replacement model.

That would change things yes.

Truman for instance would be 4th worst after Buchanan Pearce and Harding.
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Why are you so hateful toward Pearce?
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Fuck Pearce
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Eddv posted...

LordoftheMorons posted...

Jakyl25 posted...

Paratroopa1 posted...

Although to be clear I could quite honestly see an argument for Trump as not the #1 worst just because the pre-civil war dudes were THAT fucking bad

Im not a historian, but I took AP US Government, and I agree

It would be pretty tough for any modern President to match the absolute worst.

I still think that, if he left office right now, you could still make a historical case that W was worse

The way I look at it is this: consider replacing a given President with a generic semi-competent person of the same party, surrounded by standard political/career government operatives, facing all the same situations as the actual president. How does that generic person compare? Trump is the only president I am extremely confident would be an unambiguous downgrade along any axis to that generic person. Everything Trump-specific is bad.

Alternatively, consider timewarping Trump into a more consequential time period (pre-civil war, during one of the major wars, whatever). Would he have done a better job than the actual president? (I really doubt it)

Ahh the Wins Above Replacement model.

That would change things yes.

Truman for instance would be 4th worst after Buchanan Pearce and Harding.

If you switch to WAR, then what do you with a guy like Kennedy? While there were unforced errors early in the term that helped set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, I have to believe that very few people would have had the willpower to stand up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in not ordering a first strike. Do we give him credit for the east coast not being turned into a nuclear wasteland, or do we believe that a Nixon administration would never have let things get that bad in the first place?
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Xfd Reagan good one
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BeTheMan posted...

Eddv posted...

LordoftheMorons posted...

Jakyl25 posted...

Paratroopa1 posted...

Although to be clear I could quite honestly see an argument for Trump as not the #1 worst just because the pre-civil war dudes were THAT fucking bad

Im not a historian, but I took AP US Government, and I agree

It would be pretty tough for any modern President to match the absolute worst.

I still think that, if he left office right now, you could still make a historical case that W was worse

The way I look at it is this: consider replacing a given President with a generic semi-competent person of the same party, surrounded by standard political/career government operatives, facing all the same situations as the actual president. How does that generic person compare? Trump is the only president I am extremely confident would be an unambiguous downgrade along any axis to that generic person. Everything Trump-specific is bad.

Alternatively, consider timewarping Trump into a more consequential time period (pre-civil war, during one of the major wars, whatever). Would he have done a better job than the actual president? (I really doubt it)

Ahh the Wins Above Replacement model.

That would change things yes.

Truman for instance would be 4th worst after Buchanan Pearce and Harding.

If you switch to WAR, then what do you with a guy like Kennedy? While there were unforced errors early in the term that helped set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, I have to believe that very few people would have had the willpower to stand up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in not ordering a first strike. Do we give him credit for the east coast not being turned into a nuclear wasteland, or do we believe that a Nixon administration would never have let things get that bad in the first place?

This is one of the exact reasons I don't want to use the WAR model - there's a lot of counterfactual history to track down and make decisions on.

Nixon's record during Vietnam with the firebombing of Cambodia and Laos after running as a PEACE candidate for instance makes it hard to say WHAT Nixon would have done in Kennedy's shoes.

Anagram posted...

Why are you so hateful toward Pearce?

On a WAR model he is easily outperformed by a replacement level Democrat or Whig because he spent his entire term so depressed and drunk after his son died in a gruesome train accident shortly before his inauguration.He wasn't much of a leader.

He also supported the Fugitive Slave Act and the Kansas Nebraska act, breaking with what had been his expected policy positions as a Northern Democrat and doing more than any other president to create the crises that Buchanan failed to respond to.
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Eddv posted...

BeTheMan posted...

If you switch to WAR, then what do you with a guy like Kennedy? While there were unforced errors early in the term that helped set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis, I have to believe that very few people would have had the willpower to stand up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff in not ordering a first strike. Do we give him credit for the east coast not being turned into a nuclear wasteland, or do we believe that a Nixon administration would never have let things get that bad in the first place?

This is one of the exact reasons I don't want to use the WAR model - there's a lot of counterfactual history to track down and make decisions on.

Nixon's record during Vietnam with the firebombing of Cambodia and Laos after running as a PEACE candidate for instance makes it hard to say WHAT Nixon would have done in Kennedy's shoes.

A perfectly reasonable take.

MasaomiHouzuki posted...

Do people who dislike Bush consider PEPFAR when evaluating him?

I'll admit I haven't up to this point. I do think his administration deserves credit for targeting the issue, and there are elements of PEPFAR (generally on the treatment side) that they've had a lot of success with. The preventative aspects of it (abstinence-only education, anti-prostitution pledges, no needle exchange programs, etc.) are a bit more complicated. So...some points in his favor, I suppose?
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I am fairly certain Bill Clinton has the highest Wins Above Replacement
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Bush basically got no political credit for PEPFAR, got negative press for bad but not fatally bad mistakes, and did this entirely unforced. Like, if he was the bottom of the list, I think doing the equivalent of preventing 11 Civil Wars, stopping half of the holocaust or preventing the Khmer Rouge from coming to be power in Cambodia 3 times w.r.t. lives saved. (Also, taking the worst case estimates of direct casualties + knock on deaths, PEPFAR saved about 7x the number of lives) should count for *something*.

It's not clear to me that many alternative presidents could do significantly better under the war on terror (and the iraq war was terrible, but a major international foreign intelligence failure was a contributor too).

I think in W's case its that his greatest accomplishments went unheralded EVEN AT THE TIME EVEN BY HIS OWN PARTY and his mis-steps were widely known.

This is why I say - so much of his legacy is wrapped up in Iraq and Afghanistan primarily because his presidency is basically all about 9/11 and its aftermath.

His failures led to the utter destruction of his political alliance, which in turn further buried the things he did that went right. The economy tanking on his way out the door called into question his direction of the economy.

I basically think he has the potential to be Taft/Arthur style president that re-surfaces way down the line once things are more set in stone especially if the long term results in the middle east favor the Bush Doctrines underlying principles, double especially if the Republican party continues careening down its current course.

As of right now hes in my "middle 5" presidents alongside people like McKinley, Monroe, and John Q Adams.
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