In this week's installment of our series comparing Bush to the worst Presidents in human history, we realize that Warren G. Harding isn't as bad as everyone says. Nonetheless, he is quite terrible, a preposterous inept clown if not quite a traitorous pro-slavery drunk. He's like a potato chip that everyone tells you is a vomit-inducing fecal abomination, and then you try it, and it's merely a horrible chip that you would never eat, the Doritos X-13D (this chip tastes exactly like a McDonald's hamburger) to John Tyler's Pringles Extreme Blazin' Buffalo Wing.
In addition to being like a Dorito, Harding is responsible for the greatest quote that any President ever said: "I am not fit for this office and should never have been here." Technically that's apocryphal, but it's the sort of thing that is true whether or not it happened.
Foreign Policy: Harding ran for President on a platform of isolationism, nativism, and turning away from reform. He signed the Treaty of Versailles, but the real credit for that goes to Ellen Wilson, who brokered peace in the free world after Woodrow had a massive stroke. Harding wasn't really a go-getter, or even really a do-anythinger, so he didn't have any big disasters here, although the Washington Naval Conference probably contributed to the riseof Japanese imperialism in the World War II era.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? His bumbling idiot approach to Iran alone would give him this one. We'll throw in the IRAQ WAR just to make his inferiority clearer.
Domestic Policy: Not much to speak of here. This guy really liked to take naps. It says here he invented the White House Press Conference. And he signed the Fordney-McCumber tariff, an asinine attempt to protect American economic interests. Basically he didn't like the "global economy" machinery, so he jambed the invisible hand into the gears, stopping them, but leaving the hand a soft bloody pulp. The resultant counter-tariffs helped cause the Great Depression.
DBDSW? The PATRIOT act. Also the economy. Wiretapping his own civilians. That's probably sufficient to give him this one without delving any deeper.
Civil Rights: Harding favored anti-lynching laws, which would have been a monumental achievement, but unfortunately he was Harding and he never did anything about it. He signed the 1924 Immigration Act, probably the most racist and horrible immigration policy since the Alien and Sedition Act.
DBDSW? Historically this is not Bush's weakest area, primarily because I've been treating this as a proxy for racism and not addressing the "spying on American citizens" aspect. So Harding wins.
Corruption: A truly amazing cavalcade of failure and outrage. The big one is the Teapot Dome Scandal, blatant thievery by his Secretary of the Interior that resulted in the first Presidential Cabinet jail sentence. His head of the Office of Alien Policy was convicted of accepting bribes. The personal aide to his Attorney General destroyed a bunch of papers and committed suicide. Charles Forbes, his director of the Veterans Bureau, skimmed profits, received large kickbacks, ran an underground alcohol and drug distribution network, was convicted of fraud and bribery, and had an aide who killed himself. Harding also had a well-documented affair with his friend's wife, which he lied about when the Republicans asked him if he had any big secrets before they nominated him for President, which resulted in them having to send her monthly payments for years. She's the only person known to have successfully extorted a major American political party.
DBDSW? Amazingly, someone has a more corrupt administration than Bush. Of course, Bush has more personal involvement in his corruption, and it hurts America more (lying about war, committing and covering up war crimes, etc.).
Value of Replacement Player: Will tells me I'm not using this term the way sports people do. So to be clear, what I mean here is basically: How much better or worse was this person than his predecessor? The idea is that a President receives the country in a certain condition and should lose points if he makes it much worse. So if Harding had followed Lincoln, that would have been a disaster. But he didn't. He followed the tattered remnants of Wilson, who was just kind of OK. A moderately competent person might have achieved, say, a thing, instead of sleeping through scandal, but Harding's failure isn't close to Bush squandering of Clinton's successes.
Verdict: Bush is way worse. Harding shouldn't be nearly this far down on the list. But that's OK because we've discovered that Madison was unspeakably awful. So we'll just reorganize:
10. Harding
9. Reagan
8. Pierce
7. Hoover
6. Tyler
5. Bush
John Adams is off the list! We'll fill in the founding father gap next time.
Bonus What the Hell Fact: Apparently a park in Seattle had a Harding memorial commemorating that one time he stopped there and led some boy scouts in the pledge of allegiance. But then in the 1970's they tore it down and buried it under the African Savanna exhibit in their zoo. Why did any of this happen? It is in the spirit of Harding that no one will try to find out.
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