The Worst U.S. Presidents?
Games and Education Expert — Jim Jacobson
When I made this learnboard on the worst U.S. presidents, I wanted to provide the perspective that only reflection on history can offer. The catcalls of “worst president ever” show up any time either of our last two Commanders-in-Chief are in the news; in our highly-polarized political climate, Barack Obama and George W. Bush are lightning rods for knee-jerk reactions. If you’ve spent any time at all on the internet over the past decade, you know what I’m talking about. Clearly, you (perhaps you personally, perhaps not) are really angry over the direction the country took/has taken recently. Does Bush or Obama belong on the list of the Worst Ever?
Nope.
No way. Sorry! No matter what you lay at the feet of either one, they’re not even close. If you want to make a case for one or the other being the worst in your lifetime, that’s so much more plausible. Reasonable people can disagree, after all, whether the ethical, administrative, and spoken lapses of Nixon are worse than those of Obama, or whether those of George W. Bush are worse than Clinton, or similarly debate any other combinations involving Reagan, Ford, George H.W. Bush, or Carter. No matter where you set the bar, though, there has been far worse.
Barack Obama
Is Barack Obama the worst president ever? It turns out the mistaking-the-Wisconsin-flag-for-a-union-flag didn’t actually happen, but there’s still plenty that did happen. He often relied too much on his teleprompter; many feel he appeared ineffective, especially given his inability to go without it. The biggest charges against Barack Obama as president (so, ignoring the birth certificate thing, since it has no bearing on his performance in office) are:
·The Affordable Care Act, or “Obamacare,” was made law forcefully-but-legally, without compromise. Its unprecedented scale and scope make its economic effects utterly impossible to predict, and in a troubled economy, that is a very risky move indeed. It also both gives health care to those previously unwilling, unable, or ineligible to get it, and forces coverage and costs (of the whole thing) on those who did not have them before. Also, despite a great deal of advance notice, the website for enrollment was ready for perhaps an elementary school class to use, not a nation.
· The 2012 attack on the American embassy in Benghazi, Libya. Four Americans died (including the U.S. ambassador), more were injured, and the administration gave conflicting reports for weeks about what it knew, how much it knew, and when. At the very least inept, at the worst a failed cover-up, at multiple positions.
· Increased levels of warrantless surveillance and searches of law-abiding Americans’ e-mail and phone calls (begun under Bush, but it’s not as though Obama was required to keep doing it).
· Drone attacks overseas resulting in many, repeated civilian deaths. Women, children, young couples.
George W. Bush
Oh, but George W. Bush? He must be among the very worst U.S. presidents, right? After all, he said some dumb things, such as “the French don’t have a word for entrepreneur.” Oh, wait, no, he didn’t. He did say “nucular” for “nuclear” . . . but so did Clinton and Carter. But really, we don’t have to dig too deeply to find a reason people disliked him as president:
· Topping the list, the invasion of Iraq, based on evidence that ranged from flimsy to false, to stop that country from producing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMDs). When most of the international community — on whose support and goodwill the U.S. relies in an increasingly interconnected global environment — said “no”, he said “go” anyway. Afterward, no weapons were found. Saddam Hussein was indeed a bad guy, but $1.7 trillion bad?
· The invasion of Afghanistan in pursuit of Osama bin Laden mushroomed the costs borne by the American people, in money, morale, and of course American lives lost. $4 trillion is a lot of money, and 5,000+ is a lot of families destroyed.
Compared to these things, continuing to read to children during the 9/11 attacks seems pretty small — and really, what else was he supposed to do? Freak a bunch of kids out by running screaming from the room? Nonetheless, the War on Terror has had an untold cost on the U.S., both domestically and in the eyes of our international partners, so he must be one of the worst, right?
Slavery and The U.S. Civil War
Describing everything terrible about slavery and the Civil War would fill a library, so I encourage you to visit one if you just don’t see why either would be so much worse than what Bush and Obama did. Let’s also be super-clear: the crisis was not just about states’ rights. The battle wasn’t just about the North vs. the South (though that did happen); nor was it “just” about protecting a person’s way of life (that of owning slaves), the way it had been done for centuries. It was also about spreading that way of life, making more fellow-human-owning states to the West, where none existed before. Barack Obama made you buy health insurance? Oh no! Franklin Pierce signed the Kansas-Nebraska Act into law, making at least 50 people dead in the Kansas proxy war foretelling the coming unpleasantries. The conflict over such an enormous rift in values was titanic. How titanic?
It wasn’t until the Vietnam War that the American death toll of all other wars combined (including the two World Wars together!) matched the American death toll of the Civil War. The entire War on Terror is 1% of the Civil War…and that’s not all. The Civil War was shorter and bloodier: over 400 deaths per day, compared to the War on Terror’s rate of less than 2. Nearly 2% of the country’s population was killed in four years during the Civil War, one thousand times the percent killed in the War on Terror waged by the two presidents of the new millennium. The impact on the country was massive. And lest you pooh-pooh this as “ancient history,” remember that the last Civil War veteran died in 1956. He lived long enough to be filmed in color. Your own grandparents may have seen living Civil War veterans and not even known it; what’s more, their own grandparents may have been veterans.
Ultimately, we are likely too close chronologically to judge the merits of either Bush or Obama relative to the bulk of the U.S. presidents who came before them. One doesn’t need a time machine, though, to see that they don’t compare to the presidents who set us on a path to the greatest loss of life in U.S. history.
