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Favorite Presidents
FAVORITE PRESIDENTS....At a recent debate, all the candidates for RNC chairman named Reagan as their favorite Republican. Ezra Klein comments:
It's really weird that Republican candidates for high office almost never named Abraham Lincoln as their favorite Republican president. He was, after all, a Republican. And he was inarguably more consequential than Reagan, no matter how enamored you are of Reagan's tenure. Indeed, most historians consider him America's greatest president.
Ezra chalks this up to coded racism, and maybe that's right. I guess I'd guess be a little more generous, though, and attribute it instead to the different valences of favorite vs. greatest, figuring that Lincoln would be more likely to come up if these guys were asked who the greatest Republican was. Maybe.
But this is really just an excuse to observe the weird fact that for modern conservative Republicans, Reagan isn't merely their most frequently named favorite, he's pretty much their only possible answer to this question. Bush Jr. is obviously damaged goods. Bush Sr., Ford, and Eisenhower are more or less considered closet Democrats these days. Nixon was a crook. Hoover — 'nuff said. Coolidge and Harding were do-nothings. If you're restricting yourself to the past century, you're basically stuck with Reagan and no one else.
Democrats have it way better. Sure, most Dems of the past century produce mixed sentiments (especially Wilson and LBJ) but virtually every one of them is at least a plausible candidate for "favorite Democrat." Modern liberals haven't excommunicated any of them.
Why is this? Why is it that Republicans have produced only one president in the past century that they're still enthusiastic about?
Joel.
Here's a link via FARK that agrees completely.
Stop picking on Jimmy Carter
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090105/cm_csm/yrodgers05
"Oakton, Va. ? In this season of new resolutions, Americans would do well to rethink their perceptions of Jimmy Carter. President Carter has suffered the misfortune of having his legacy almost entirely shaped by his political enemies rather than by objective reality or a basic sense of American fairness.
Today, Carter is caricatured as a weak-kneed, sweater-wearing puritan who struggled with lust in his heart, presided over a malaised America, and micromanaged even the scheduling of the White House tennis courts. More recently, he's taken heat for his blunt portrayal of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
What an egregiously undeserved reputation. Carter wasn't just a "good man who got in over his head," as critics say. He was in fact quite a good president.
He kept us out of endless wars. He protected the Alaskan wilderness (Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D) of Wisconsin once told me that "Carter was the greatest environmental president the country ever had.") He promoted a visionary energy policy. He countered the Soviet military threat. And since he left office, he has persistently promoted the cause of peace around the world. The landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty he fashioned remains in force today.
Against the backdrop of an unnecessary trillion-dollar war in Iraq, it is instructive to recall how Carter avoided a similar morass when he negotiated the Panama Canal treaties, for which he was excoriated by Ronald Reagan's Republicans. When he left office, he was able to say with Thomas Jefferson "[D]uring the period of my administration not a drop of the blood of a single citizen was shed by the sword of war."
...
Well, Clarence Thomas likes Hoover, Coolidge & Harding. He's not gunning for RNC Chairman, but at least some R's appreciate non-Reagan 20th century presidents.
And don't forget Teddy Roosevelt, even if most modern R's do.
I couldn't be bothered to read Ezra's article since you couldn't be bothered to link to it(*). But what a bunch of bullshit it is, and your agreement with it is.
I don't like Reagan and didn't vote for him, but as an alternative to it having to be racism, perhaps just the fact that Reagan was alive during these politicians coming up probably has a lot more to do with it than a claim of racism.
Outrageous claims demand outrageous evidence. You have not provided any evidence except a claim to the truthiness of how evil Republicans must be.
(*) I probably would not have bothered to read it anyway, but I'm going to hide behind your lapse.... :)
And the way the Obamabots excoriated Bill Clinton as the Devil, I wouldn't be so quick to wonder about why Republican's consider all but Ronnie damaged goods.
My thought is that the modern Republican party is dominated by extremists. Reagan was the only far right president that hasn't been a disaster...
Before Reagan, the John Birch society was the lunatic fringe of the Republican party. After Reagan, it IS the Republican party.
I'd put it down to standard traits of authoritarian personalities -- rigidity, oversimplification, doctrinal purity -- and the resulting hero-worship.
They NEED a single, defining "pole" of purity and perfection. Reagan is simply that pole in the political arena. And the nature and simplicity of perfection means there can be only one.
There is only one white, there is only one God, there is only one True Faith. To have more than one would invite comparison and result in confusion. Their minds simply couldn't handle it.
And BTW, I think it's time we stopped paying attention to what Republicans say they think. First, they're probably lying, and second, if they're not, their points of view probably are so pathological and/or ill-considered that they're not worth worrying about.
"...the fact that Reagan was alive during these politicians coming up probably has a lot more to do with it than a claim of racism."
Of course it does. I'm a long-time reader of Ezra's (since Pandagon) & I'm inclined to think his closing comment was entirely tongue-in-cheek.
What freaks me out is the group-think dynamic on display when it comes to Reagan worship. It's high time to stop using "The Cult of Reaganism" in the ironic sense & start using it as a literal description.
Actually PTate, I know a member (of John Birch), they are hardcore libertarian, kinda like RonPaul squared. And like Ron Paul, there are many issues where they are seriously in disagreement with the Republican party (such as torture, and our activist foreign policy). They are still nuts IMO, but they are far from the Republican (or rightwing) mainstream.
And, Bush senior, didn't he invent the New World Order, that conservatives as so very paranoid about!
PTate in MN: Before Reagan, the John Birch society was the lunatic fringe of the Republican party. After Reagan, it IS the Republican party.
Don't be so fast to smear the Birchers. The John Birch Society had a poll, and the majority wanted Bush impeached for pissing on the Bill of Rights. Maybe those folks aren't so bad after all.
Dems of the past century produce mixed sentiments (especially Wilson and LBJ) but virtually every one of them is at least a plausible candidate for "favorite Democrat."I doubt you would get many votes for Jimmy Carter as "favorite Democratic president." But even Carter was better than nearly all of the 20th Century Republicans, Reagan included.
A problem confronting Republicans is that they have no actual accomplishments, at least none I can think of since the Interstate Highway System. Reagan had essentially nothing to do with ending the cold war, but that's their story, and they're sticking to it, since it's all they have. So Reagan the Commie-Killer is their hero story, the only thing they have to be proud of.
Reagan happened in most voters' lifetimes, but most either have forgotten or were not old enough to understand that dozens of his appointees were found guilty of crimes, that the S&L crisis happened on his watch, throwing our economy into a downward spiral, and that we did not have a significant population of homeless people until his administration threw its weight against the mentally ill and those unable to fend for themselves in a case before the Supreme Court. One of Reagan's favorite lines was about America being a beacon of charity, so these people would be taken care of by the "private sector". Reagan was definitely Dickensian in his attitude toward the homeless. (Are there no poorhouses? No prisons?)
Republicans who say their favorite president was Reagan either aren't old enough to have lived through his terms, or are not remembering reality, or are unethical assholes who don't mind that his administration was one of the most corrupt in history.
Joel.
Here's a link via FARK that agrees completely.
Stop picking on Jimmy Carter
http://news.yahoo.com/s/csm/20090105/cm_csm/yrodgers05
"Oakton, Va. In this season of new resolutions, Americans would do well to rethink their perceptions of Jimmy Carter. President Carter has suffered the misfortune of having his legacy almost entirely shaped by his political enemies rather than by objective reality or a basic sense of American fairness.
Today, Carter is caricatured as a weak-kneed, sweater-wearing puritan who struggled with lust in his heart, presided over a malaised America, and micromanaged even the scheduling of the White House tennis courts. More recently, he's taken heat for his blunt portrayal of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians.
What an egregiously undeserved reputation. Carter wasn't just a "good man who got in over his head," as critics say. He was in fact quite a good president.
He kept us out of endless wars. He protected the Alaskan wilderness (Sen. Gaylord Nelson (D) of Wisconsin once told me that "Carter was the greatest environmental president the country ever had.") He promoted a visionary energy policy. He countered the Soviet military threat. And since he left office, he has persistently promoted the cause of peace around the world. The landmark Israeli-Egyptian peace treaty he fashioned remains in force today.
Against the backdrop of an unnecessary trillion-dollar war in Iraq, it is instructive to recall how Carter avoided a similar morass when he negotiated the Panama Canal treaties, for which he was excoriated by Ronald Reagan's Republicans. When he left office, he was able to say with Thomas Jefferson "[D]uring the period of my administration not a drop of the blood of a single citizen was shed by the sword of war."
...
How about a serious answer to the question? The word "extremist" has been mentioned, but that extremism might be a symptom of something deeper, and not even that troublesome. Remember that conservatism is really a rearguard action against modernism in a lot of ways. As such, it both departs from contemporary reality in a certain way, but more important, it chooses a couple-three really simple yardsticks by which to measure a politician, a policy, or a movement. That is: low taxes, strong defense, small government, "freedom" over "equality" broadly defined. And of course effectiveness counts too. When your ideology is that simple, it's a lot easier to come to an agreement about who was effective. Liberals, by their nature, are driving the debate rather than continually reacting to it appalled, and therefore have a more complex relation to events. Each liberal will have an individual and complex take on any subject, including presidents, whereas each conservative will largely resemble other conservatives.
Once you realize that the Republican Party is devoted to America's destruction, everything they do or say makes sense.
Modern Republicanism is a reaction against two things: 1) the New Deal; and 2) the social changes of the '60s. Reagan was an expression of that reactionism, even though he wasn't any good at getting anything done about it.
I think the problem with these analyses, by the way, is that the Republican Party of today is quite a different beast than it was when Eisenhower ran the show and before that. The Republicans, as we all know, have always been the party of big business, but they used to be the party of social progressives as well (the ERA, for example, was a Republican initiative, Lincoln freed the slaves, and so on). Now, they are the party of big business and social conservatives -- they've entirely flipped on social issues. What president, besides Reagan, embodies those modern Republican values, who isn't an utter failure? If you're a Republican now, looking for a hero, it's Reagan or nobody.
I wouldn't call Harding a do-nothing President. He managed to do quite a bit (and all of it corrupt) in perhaps the shortest amount of time of all Republicans of the 20th century.
It's actually amazing, if you read the news articles from the early 1920's, how similiar he is to Bush II.
Naming Reagan is the political equivalent of "World Peace" for a beauty pageant contestant. The judges will dock them if they don't get it right.
There is no greater disaster for Republicans than Reagan's 11th Commandment "speak no ill of a fellow Republican." As Reps sit and look at the smoldering ruins of their party, this is what they need to focus on. You gotta call BS when you see BS.
What, even on Mother Jones the trolls try to pretend racism doesn't exist?
Among southern white conservatives who still remember the Civil War (a high percentage of them) Lincoln is still the most hated of all presidents. These people are the heart of the Republican party nowadays.
There's more than one reason why southern pols have to spit venom whenever they speak the word "Union!"
Sal is right. Coolidge is pretty popular with the wingnuts. (I'm less sure about Hoover and Harding.) On Karl Rove's authority, I think they also like McKinley.
"Don't be so fast to smear the Birchers."
Alex, bigTom...okay, okay, but how amazing to reflect that the modern Republican party makes even the John Birch society seem like one of the good guys!
AW & Mike nail it. Reagan is all they have & they are totally insane in their fixation on destroying America.
Begone Reagan Spell !
"...Never was such a cleverness used in the design of making us all stupid...." - Voltaire
I think "ArtEclectic" has it right; Reagan is the no-brainer choice when pandering to a no-brainer party. But let's not forget that Reagan is popular because his administration went all out in their waning months to boost his personal popularity so that conservative Republicans would have a modern president to rally around who was not incompetent, criminal, or associated with the greatest disasters of the century. In essence, he's constantly named by conservatives because he's the only one they have who is not associated with failure, and even that required an expensive administrative effort in mythmaking.
Reagan is a talisman. Like the Dem's Kennedy, hell, like King Arthur, a myth not reality. Like the Dems during late Johnson and Nixon, the Republicans have nothing else to cling to. No one who stirs the blood or offers hope.
So they sit around the tribal fires and repeat the great mythical stories.
As to Kevin's point about Lincoln, the Great Emancipator and leader of the Union can be somewhat of a dicey proposition for a political party that depends so much on the vote of crackers.
" . . .he was able to say with Thomas Jefferson "[D]uring the period of my administration not a drop of the blood of a single citizen was shed by the sword of war."
Jefferson seemed to have forgotten that his Navy fought a war with the Barbary Pirates, and a lot of sailors died in it. Perhaps he did not think of them as citizens--or he was just lying again, as usual in the most impeccable prose.
I think it's less nefarious than many of your commenters suggest. You're right: Reagan is in living memory, Lincoln is not (and for Republitarians, Lincoln is a very mixed bag for all of his violations of the Bill of Rights). The modern GOP is an uneasy alliance of national security hard-liners, republitarians, and social conservatives. This was a very *effective* coalition in 1980, against the post-Vietnam, anti-market and big government, pro 60's social change Dems. Today's Dems have changed from so much of this that no Reagan figure can hold these together. Any lean to one makes it hard to please the other constituencies. So we get McCain (foreign policy), Romney (republitarians) and Huckabee (soccons), with none of them being able to create a Reagan appeal. Reagan was the harmonic convergence they can't recreate.
I think one factor is that being a good liberal means doing more with government. So Johnson did the War on Poverty and Civil Rights. FDR obviously did an enormous amount. Wilson did many things. They are remembered for what they did.
Being a good conservative means (in part) NOT doing more with government. Coolidge was a fine conservative by this standard. However, for that very reason there's nothing to talk about. Today none of us know much about Calvin Coolidge or even think about him.
i like obama. he is nice
go to bed timmy. you are a retard
Like all presidents Carter had traits, and results, both good and bad. Thus far no one has mentioned the single most positive act of his presidency, pardoning the Vietnam draft resisters. If you think the culture wars have been bad these last twenty years, imagine them with that festering sore.
Unfortunately, once you get past that action, along with the Panama Canal treaties and some decent moves on the environment -- he more than doubled the size of the national park system -- you're pretty much done with the asset side of Carter's ledger. I guess some fraction of the Camp David accords should go to him, but it was Sadat who made the bold move that set the stage.
For those not old enough to remember it's almost impossible to describe how bleak the late 70s were in the US. There were three separate recessions in the decade, two oil crises, and economic productivity barely budged. Inflation grew steadily despite the highly distinct policies of three different presidents, hitting close to 20% in the first two quarters of 1980. (I had a part-time job in the local college package store and remember Tuesday as "price day" when it might take my entire shift to go through the shelves putting new price tags on all the bottles.
The Summer of Sam, the hostage crisis, the bungled hostage rescue, Three Mile Island... it goes on.
To be sure, Carter wasn't personally responsible for most of these events, just a victim of bad luck. But his melodramatic approach -- in my lifetime he's the only president to publicly complain that "the job is too big for one man" -- meant he was going to take a lot of the blame. And in foreign policy he was utterly feckless, piously lecturing countries about "human rights" while cozying up to the Shah, saying "the scales have fallen from my eyes" after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, having his secretary of state resign in protest after the failed hostage rescue, saying he wouldn't leave the white house until the hostages were freed, and then changing his mind when he fell behind Kennedy in the polls.
History has been kind to a couple of 20th century Democratic presidents (Truman and, amazingly, Wilson) but I doubt it will extend the same benefit to Carter.
Don't be so fast to smear the Birchers. The John Birch Society had a poll, and the majority wanted Bush impeached for pissing on the Bill of Rights. Maybe those folks aren't so bad after all.
Must not be my step-dad's John Birch Society. Birchers I met were certain that Martin Luther King was a communist plant and that we sold out the Cubans at the Bay of Pigs.
I don't recall any particular affection for Bill of Rights, either. At least not the parts concerning the rights of war protesters, civil rights workers, etc. But, that was forty years ago.
Minos: and for Republitarians, Lincoln is a very mixed bag for all of his violations of the Bill of Rights
Thanks, this gave me quite the laugh. Can't wait to see how W's already anemic approval ratings go once the truth comes out about torture, warrantless eavesdropping, etc.
And FWIW I strenuously hope Obama appoints a commission or special prosecutor to ferret out and make all this available to the public. Not after a witch hunt or retribution, but it has to be made clear to all who hold high office that if they trample on the constitution those who follow won't just look the other way.
My favorite Republican President is Teddy Roosevelt. But, I guess "progressive" and "Republican" were forever separated as a result of his legacy - the party of Lincoln no more!
Nixon is disqualified for being liberal on domestic issues and wage/price controls not the illegalities of bombing Cambodia and using the government for political purposes.
Indeed, most historians consider him [Lincoln] America's greatest president.
Historians want to sell books, and violence, carnage, and amputation sell, not peace and prosperity.
Most of those conservatives have no information on any president prior to Reagan and they possess very little accurate information about Reagan.
This is true in the sense that they want a "republic," whatever their current definition of that is, rather than a democracy, the very idea of which they despise. For example, my son, a rabid Republican, feels that the unwashed masses are far too stupid to be trusted to elect a president without the safety net of the electoral college. And he is against public funding of elections because then any old crackpot peasant could afford to run for office. Just wouldn't work, Mom.
I doubt you would get many votes for Jimmy Carter as "favorite Democratic president."
I don't think many would eagerly list Bill Clinton as their "favorite president" either.
Which leaves, basically, Kennedy and Roosevelt as obvious choices. Ask half a dozen candidates for some top Dem post for their favourites president and you might be surprised at how uniform their answers turn out to be too.
Reagen was a good old boy to Republicans-he broke the back of unions, did away with regulations and had a bank bailout when the rich did their speculation thing, and decided he would also run the world. The only difference between him and G.W. was that he was more competent and didn't have Cheney telling him what to do!
The overlap between those who think of Ronald Reagan as the greatest U.S. president and of John Wayne as the greatest American cowboy is significant. Never underestimate the power of mythmaking.
No love for TR?
It's not just coded racism.
The RNC is mostly run by white males from states that were part of the confederacy or leaned that way. They still haven't forgive Lincoln. To them he is most definitely not a good president - unless they want to trot him out in an effort to lure African Americans.
Wilson deserves excommunication by modern liberals.
Other commenters have put their finger on it by comparing the mythmaking of the Reagan and Kennedy presidencies. For what its worth, when I was in elementary school in the late 70's, JFK was everyone's favorite president, facts aside.
Lyndon Johnson was my favorite President. He did more for the cause of Civil Rights since any President since Lincoln, even knowing it would cause the Democratic party to lose the South for a generation (at the least). And his Great Society was the bee's knees, as far as I'm concerned. If it wasn't for Vietnam...
My favorite president of my lifetime is Al Gore, who was the legitimately elected President of the United States in 2000.
Unfortunately he was prevented from taking office by a bloodless coup engineered by a cabal of career white collar crooks who attempted to steal the election with massive voter disenfranchisement and fraud, and then when that failed, turned to a bunch of corrupt, partisan Republican hacks on the Supreme Court who egregiously and sneeringly violated their oaths of office to put their hand-picked stooge in the White House.
I believe that at the dawn of the 21st century, Al Gore was -- and still is -- the single person most qualified to serve as President of the USA.
With his ongoing work to educate and advocate around the need to deal with anthropogenic global warming by making a rapid transition to a post-carbon, sustainable energy economy based on harvesting limitless, abundant, free wind and solar energy, Al Gore is in my view stepping up to a challenge greater than anything that confronted any other president in US history. Indeed, the best thing that President Obama could do with regard to the closely interconnected issues of climate/environment, energy and economy would be to implement the ten-year plan that Gore's organization has put forward.
The blatant theft of the 2000 election was a tragedy for all of humanity, not only because it foisted the corrupt and criminal Cheney-Bush regime upon the world, but because it denied the world the vision and leadership of Al Gore at such a crucial time. Literally hundreds of millions of human lives, and much of the Earth's rich, diverse biosphere, will almost certainly be lost in coming decades as a direct result of that heinous crime.
My favorite Republican President is Teddy Roosevelt. But, I guess "progressive" and "Republican" were forever separated as a result of his legacy - the party of Lincoln no more!
I think it is more than that. Even if a modern Republican bothered to read a little history he would probably be turned off by TR because Teddy's party welcomed women, he set aside much Federal land as parks, and here is the big deal-breaker - he went after the corporate monopolies!
He was also big on competence and fairness and a strong US.
So far it sounds like aside from the "strong US" point Teddy was for everything the modern Republican is against.
The modern Republican party is like a loser alky who doesn't want to hear about his successful Gramps cause it makes him feel guilty and worthless.
SecularAnimist,
The election was stolen but Gore was also ahead of his time.
People were not ready for change at that time because people had not yet experienced any hardships. Sadly to say people are still not ready for change, not really, because they are still coasting along fairly well and any change will hurt. Sadly, people will only choose 'hurt' when the alternative is 'bigger hurt.'
I think history bears this out fairly well, and yes, it is annoying as hell.
We are gonna be annoyed by how little Obama seems to get done in the next couple years. Things have to get worse before they can get better.
People - watta ya gonna do?! Can't live with em, can't live without em.
Coolidge could read six languages, five of them foreign. Not somebody today's xenophobes and anti-intellectuals would have been comfortable with. Not to mention his career as a student radical protesting compulsory religious exercises.
Hat tip to Tom Marchioro for IMO a fair and accurate assessment of Jimmy Carter and the general crapulence of the mid/late 1970s.
Carter seems like a good man and he does not deserved to be remembered as History's Greatest Monster no matter what The Simpsons says. But does that mean he was a good President? Eh, not so much.
As for Reagan, don't make it so complicated - he and Ike are the only successful Republican presidents in living memory. And not too many people remember Ike.
Why not Lincoln? Because Lincoln has entered Secular Saint territory. Saying that Lincoln is your favorite President tells me nothing about your current political leanings. It's like saying "good things are good." True, and...?