Bush vs. Worst, Part IX

Welcome to the ninth installment of our series comparing George W. Bush to the worst U.S. Presidents in human history. This week, we take a look at a man whose shockingly proactive incompetence may surprise you: James Madison.

Madison arguably had one of the best pre-Presidencies. He wrote the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, came up with the Bill of Rights, did some solid work in Congress and, as Secretary of State under Jefferson, oversaw the Louisiana Purchase. Unfortunately, none of that stuff counts.

Foreign Policy: The main thing Madison did was the War of 1812, a comically poorly-handled fiasco. It started off as bad blood between the British and Americans. We felt that we should be able to trade with the French even if the British were desperately trying to ward off Napoleon, and the Brits felt that they should be able to pull people off our ships and conscript them into the Royal Navy. Madison decided the answer was to go to war against the most powerful nation on Earth. Naturally, pretty much everyone in America disagreed with him, noting that we didn't exactly have a "good military". According to this great Wikipedia sentence: "Madison carefully prepared public opinion for what everyone at the time called "Mr. Madison's War", but much less time and money was spent building up the army, navy, forts, and state militias."
Almost everything that followed was ludicrously terrible:

• Madison decided to get things started by invading Canada, which for some reason everyone thought would be easy. Jefferson called it "a matter of marching", and Madison tried to do it with a few small state militias. It turned out to be a matter of gross failure.
• The highlight of the war came when the British effortlessly marched into Washington D.C., ate the dinner that Madison had left when he fled the White House, burned down the White House, destroyed the Treasury, and scared the U.S. into setting our own naval yards on fire.
  
• Britain easily held us at bay even though they were also fighting the Napoleonic wars, one of the greatest military campaigns in world history.
  
• We started out with 12,000 troops. We tried to get more, but no one was interested. By contrast, Britain sent over 15,000 troops as a supplement, over a year into the war, after they had defeated Napoleon.
• Britain immediately set up a Naval blockade of the entire American coastline, destroying our economy. Total exports fell from $130 million in 1807 to $7 million in 1814.
• New England openly hated the war, smuggled goods to the enemy, and considered secession.
• We surrendered Detroit without even fighting, even though we probably had enough guys to win.
• One of our few victories came when we burned down a town near Niagra, causing all the inhabitants to freeze to death in the snow.
  
• We lost 40% more troops than the British.

Eventually everyone got tired of the war and quit. Under the terms of the peace, Britain made none of the concessions that we had demanded at the war's outset, and each country got exactly the same territory it had had before the war started. Our one gain was Mobile, AL, which had been owned by the Spanish. In Britain, according to another great Wikipedia sentence: "The war was scarcely noticed at the time and is scarcely remembered in Britain because it was overshadowed by the far larger conflict against Napoleon Bonaparte."
Did Bush Do Something Worse? No.

Domestic Policy: Technically a lot of the War of 1812 was domestic, since Madison elected to hold it on U.S. soil. But we only want to count it once. Even so, he is remarkably bad. For one thing, he let the charter for the National Bank expire and opposed renewing it for the next two years, until he realized he couldn't finance his war at all. The economy sucked when the British ended our trade with everyone (except for the illegal smuggling with the British), but that's foreign policy. He had dumb governing principles, refusing to fund roads, bridges and canals, which are the classic example of things that everyone agrees the government should fund.
DBDSW? Yeah, if we separate the War of 1812 from this, and consider Bush's own economic disasters on top of his wiretapping experiments, he takes this one.

Civil Rights: The British easily convinced tens of thousands of Native Americans and slaves to fight on their side. Also, Andrew Jackson killed a bunch of Creek.
DBDSW? No.

Corruption: Don't see much reported on Madison for this, though it's probably overshadowed by the War of 1812.
DBDSW? Easily yes.

Value of Replacement Player: For the first time, this is quite close. Jefferson and Clinton are similar tier Presidents, although Clinton is probably better. But I'd say the dropoff from the end of Clinton to now is greater than that from the end of Jefferson to the end of Madison. Madison had deeper lows, but ended better. So this goes to Bush in the closest contest yet.

Verdict: This is a really tough one. It is difficult to overstate the failure of the War of 1812. It's like the peewee football team of lovable misfits in the movie "Little Giants" took on the actual New York Giants, during the Super Bowl, and had all their parents' houses burned down. It is as though the Iraq War had been relentlessly campaigned for by Saddam Hussein. But I think there are three mitigating factors here:

1. The scope of possible failure was greater for Madison. As a young country with a shakier economy and smaller military relative to a very powerful Europe, we could easily have collapsed entirely. I'd say Madison's failure was well within the realm of the conceivable for his era, whereas someone sitting in 2000 would never have envisioned America as it is today under Bush.
2. We were doing OK by the end of Madison's run. He oversaw a recovery and general swell in morale (so great that they call it the Era of Good Feelings) that you can't really imagine under Bush.
3. Bush has a greater breadth of failure. No one thing he did is worse than 1812, but when you add up our current recession, the wiretapping, Iran mishandling, Afghanistan mishandling, North Korea mishandling, egregious torture of prisoners and associated war crimes, PATRIOT act, Dept.of Justice scandal, Valerie Plame scandal, No Child Left Behind failures, provocation of Russia, general anti-environmentalism including abandoning the Kyoto Protocol, historically enormous budget and trade deficits, anti-stem cell research positions, support of the Federal Marriage Act, Katrina fiasco, undermining of the Constitution especially with signing statements, illegal victory against Gore and swift-boating of John Kerry and ruination of the Supreme Court, you get something in the same ballpark as 1812.

Yikes, after writing that list, it seems pretty clear that Bush gets this one.
Coming up next: Presidents who are even worse.

Bush vs. Worst, pt. VIII

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.

Bush vs. Worst: Part VII

This is the sixth installment in our series comparing George W. Bush to the worst U.S. Presidents of all human history. This week, the fifth-worst: Franklin Pierce, the man who became responsible for the second-greatest Presidential quote of all time, when, upon leaving the White House, he said, “There’s nothing left to do but get drunk.”

The only President who ever sought reelection but got turned down by his own party, Pierce’s life is so pathetic that he almost deserves sympathy even in the face of his utter failure as a man. Consider the first four months of the year he took office: In January, his family was in a train wreck. He and his wife survived, but watched as their 11-year-old son was crushed to death (their two other kids died in 1836 and 1843). In March, Abigail Fillmore, the previous first lady, died, and in April, Pierce’s Vice President, William R. King completed the ruthless march of despair by dying of tuberculosis. Pierce never bothered to appoint another VP, pretty much summing up his legacy as a leader.

Foreign Policy: In Pierce’s era the U.S. didn’t really have much foreign policy, so his imperialism, though deplorable, didn’t result in much. Nonetheless, he still managed to have a hand in the Ostend Manifesto, which said that we would buy Cuba for $100 million, or, if that didn’t take with the Spanish, we’d probably have the right to take it over by force. The memo was supposed to be a secret but it leaked and was considered embarrassingly imperialist even though this was the mid-19^th century. Pierce manages to have a notably bad Cuba-policy for a U.S. President, which is also pretty impressive.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? The Iraq invasion alone is enough. Let’s just mention his botching of negotiations with Iran and North Korea to make this incontrovertible. For what it’s worth, his Cuba policy also sucks.

Domestic Policy: There are two main parts. First, Pierce worked closely with Jefferson Davis and Lincoln-opponent Stephen Douglas to replace the relatively-OK Compromise of 1850 with the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Basically it said those two territories could be states and the people would vote on whether they had slavery. Then people called the Border Ruffians snuck into Kansas from Missouri, terrorized voters and cast fraudulent votes. Pierce immediately recognized their government and openly detested the Free-Staters. Eventually this all led to Bleeding Kansas, open violent rebellion in an American State that left 56 dead.
Second, Pierce had a hand in the Gadsden Purchase, a $10 million deal with Mexico that bought us the southern parts of New Mexico and Arizona. Wikipedia calls this “the greatest success of the Pierce Presidency”. It is named for James Gadsden, a rabid pro-slavery asshole who called for South Carolina to secede in 1850. Many Mexican historians consider this deal the basis of Mexico-U.S. tension that still exists today. Otherwise, Pierce generically helped the country spiral into civil war.
DBDSW? I’d say it’s neck-and-neck, which is pathetic for Bush, since Pierce’s stuff led to the Civil War. But Bush has done a greater number of things (spying on U.S. citizens, the Patriot Act, Katrina, ruining the environment, etc.), and this economic catastrophe might put him over the top.

Civil Rights: Pierce was a staunch advocate of slavery. He was bad on civil rights even in the context of an era when owning humans was legal.
DBDSW? No.

Corruption: Pierce’s administration doesn’t seem to have had any scandals that stood the test of time.
DBDSW? The Justice Department thing alone is among the most deplorable Presidential scandals in history.

Value of Replacement Player: I don’t think anyone has beaten Bush in this category yet. Clinton was clearly a better President than Millard Fillmore, and Bush still arguably brought us lower than Pierce did.

Verdict: Pierce is definitely one of the ten worst Presidents, but Bush beats him so easily, and the Hoover and especially Tyler battles were so much worse than I expected, that I’ve decided to adjust the list a little: We’ll just switch Tyler and Pierce. So now it looks like this:
10. John Adams
9. Ronald Reagan
8. Franklin Pierce
7. Herbert Hoover
6. John Tyler
5. George W. Bush

Bonus Fun Fact: Harriet Beecher Stowe was none too happy about Pierce’s blatant pro-Southern leanings in the Civil War. She called him the arch-traitor. Her brother, famed abolitionist preacher Henry Ward Beecher, sent rifles to Kansas so Free-Staters could kill Border Ruffians. They were popularly known as Beecher’s Bibles.

Bush vs. Worst: Part V

After a long hiatus, I will hopefully be returning to frequent posting again, and what better way to start than with our most tendentious feature: comparing Bush to America’s most grotesque Presidential failures. Just in case we have retained a reader, and that reader has forgotten, here’s the list so far:

10. John Adams

9. Ronald Reagan

8. John Tyler

7. George W. Bush

Can Bush keep chuggin’ on down the list? This week’s challenger: Herbert Hoover!

It’s kind of sad that Hoover was such a godawful President, because he was a pretty good guy. He made his name in World War I getting food to victims. When accused of aiding Bolshevism through food-relief, he said, "Twenty million people are starving. Whatever their politics, they shall be fed!", which is awesome. But man, the Great Depression. He royally screwed the pooch on that one. So we’ll add an economy category to this one.

Domestic: Some good. He added 3 million acres to national parks, proposed creating the Dept. of Education, and got Hoover Dam going. He doubled the number of veteran hospitals, although he’s net bad for veterans’ affairs because of the Bonus Army thing, where a bunch of WWI vets asked for their money, so Hoover sent the U.S. Army to attack its own veterans, first with a cavalry charge, then with a fucking bayonet charge. Patton was in charge of the tanks, because evidently they used tanks. To be fair, Hoover didn’t expect MacArthur to send bayonets after impoverished veterans—no one knew that guy was insane yet.*

Did Bush Do Something Worse? I don’t think any one thing is comparable to attacking the army with the army. But Hoover did have some good moves, and MacArthur really was a terrifying lunatic, and Bush has had many more terrible moves (worse education policy, Katrina, domestic wiretapping, etc.). To the extent you can separate this stuff from the economy (not much), Bush is pretty significantly worse.

Economy: Hoo boy. Wikipedia says his stance on the economy was “largely based on volunteerism”, which is exactly as brilliant as it sounds. He essentially took a Buchanan approach to economic disaster, sitting around while the whole world spiraled into a hellish maelstrom of failure. He avoided legislative solutions for years; the major legislation he signed was the Smoot-Hawley tariff, widely considered a primary catalyst for deepening depressions worldwide. Guys like Milton Friedman and Ben Bernanke think that his contractionary monetary policy was the biggest problem, and guys like Keynes think it was his refusal to spend government money, but they all agree: he ruined everything. Of course, he inherited a lot of his problems, but he had been an extremely powerful Commerce Secretary for most of the 1920’s, so he largely inherited them from himself. Oh sure, he tried things like the National Credit Corporation, which could have saved banks, but it was based on volunteerism (i.e. the opposite of capitalism), so it failed horribly. Unemployment hit 24.9%, a preposterous number.

DBDSW?: No. Of course, when I started this series, I thought it would be Bush’s basket of failures against Hoover’s one big gun, but then I took a few weeks off and Bush came back with a competing economic tailspin. It’s hard to say how much worse our economy will get, but it’s very likely the worst since Hoover, and Bush is quite blameworthy (lax regulations plus corruption plus generally not knowing anything about the economy equals oh shit). So although Hoover easily wins this category, it’s not nearly by the margin I would have thought at this time in August.

Foreign Policy: It seems good: Solid foreign relations, more or less ending the Roosevelt corollary, asking for the “Hoover Moratorium” so Germany wouldn’t have to keep starving by paying France make-believe money. But then you remember that he oversaw the collapse of the world financial system, which among other things, led to the rise of the Nazis and set the stage for WWII.

DBDSW? Well, he’s trying. Iceland might be finished with its little independence experiment, for example. But he’s less to blame than Hoover on the economic side. On the other hand, the Iraq War, the squandering of U.S. goodwill abroad, the failure to win in Afghanistan, the blundering attempts to provoke China, Russia and Iran into power struggles, and the many war crimes represent a much more proactively terrible policy. Hoover was wrong, but he simply did not actively, maliciously create problems like Bush has. Call it a tie.

Civil Rights: Hoover was pretty solid for his time on Native American rights. He was not much worse than average for his time on black rights, which is to say, he ignored them completely as people were lynched everywhere. The Depression was not kind to minorities. He also supported the Mexican Repatriation, which sent over 500,000 people of Mexican descent back to Mexico, even though many (a majority by most counts I’m seeing) were U.S. citizens.

DBDSW? I’d say Bush is worse compared to his contemporaries, but Hoover’s contemporaries were such assholes that Hoover wins this one. It’s not the salient category this time, though.

Corruption: Hoover was not especially corrupt.

DBDSW? Ha ha! Ah, yes.

Value of Replacement Player: This category is turning out to be a real bummer for Bush. Say what you will about Clinton, there’s no doubt America did well under him. Hoover followed Coolidge and Harding, two of our worst Presidents. Bush has the misfortune (kind of) to follow one of our few non-dismal-failure Presidents, so instead of handling a terrible situation very poorly, like Hoover, he took a good situation, turned it into a terrible situation, and then handled it very poorly. Bush wins this one in a landslide.

Verdict: We’re getting into the tough entries here. The Great Depression is far worse than anything Bush has done, but he’s doing his damndest to catch up on economics alone, and by God if he isn’t making an impressive show of it. Even if the economy recovers, it’s clear that Bush was a remarkably terrible steward of it, and I think that when you add in his despicable cowardly militarism (Hoover was maybe the least war-criminal of any of our Presidents), immense corruption, and squandering of the Clinton successes, he still takes the prize.

*Bonus Fun Fact: FDR had to deal with the same pissed off WWI vets, so he sent Eleanor to smooth-talk them over some coffee. Somehow she convinced them they really wanted to volunteer to labor on the federal highway system in Florida, where 258 of them died in a hurricane.

Links to come later.

Bush vs. Worst: Part IV

This is the fourth installment in our series comparing George W. Bush to the worst U.S. Presidents of all human history. Coming in at number seven: John Tyler

A horrible leader and weird-looking guy, John Tyler was also responsible for this great Wikipedia sentence: “Tyler's Presidency was rarely taken seriously in his time, as suggested by the nickname, His Accidency.” He became President when William Henry Harrison caught pneumonia and died because he refused to shut up at his bitterly cold outdoor inauguration.


Before we get to the usual categories of comparison, you have to have a little background. Tyler didn’t really have what you might ordinarily call “policy”, because everyone either hated or ignored him. His assumption of the Presidency wasn’t even technically legal until 1967. Harrison’s entire cabinet except for one guy resigned when Tyler took office (Daniel Webster stayed to finish some stuff, then quit), and a few months after that he was officially expelled from the Whig Party. Years later, the government wouldn’t even officially mourn his death, because he had exercised his usual good judgment and joined the Confederate House of Representatives shortly beforehand.

Foreign Policy: Wikipedia doesn’t even have this as a category for Tyler, as they do for most Presidents, and the first Google hit for “John Tyler foreign policy” only lists two things, which seems about right. First, Webster established a clear Maine-Canada border, an issue so tense that not a single person died in combat in the half-assed war that accompanied it. Second, Tyler set up the annexation of Texas, which was a foreign country at the time. This increased tension between slave and free states, but technically that was bad domestic policy.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? Clearly he did.

Domestic Policy: Here Tyler was more active about achieving little, in that he vetoed basically the entire Congressional agenda. Sometimes this worked well, as in the 1842 Dorr rebellion in Rhode Island, to which Tyler responded by hanging out until it ended on its own. Other times it was more like Tyler was doing nothing about the horrible economic Depression that existed for most of his term, and then sometimes he was increasing sectionalism, making him responsible for the nation’s continued slide toward the Civil War.
DBDSW? Both basically sat around while domestic affairs slowly sank into disrepair. I see both of them as ship captains just cold kicking back, propping their feet up on the big wheel thing, and not even looking around as the ship gradually drifts toward the Arctic. But Bush is also wiretapping his passengers, so he’s worse.

Civil Rights: Tyler’s Native American policy was pretty good, but, on the other hand, he was staunchly pro-slavery and owned slaves himself for his whole life.
DBDSW? No, this is not even close.

Value of Replacement Player: It’s looking like this will really hurt Bush in most of these contests. Tyler technically came after Harrison, who got elected, made a speech, and keeled over and died. But he really came after Van Buren, a low-grade failure more or less on the level of Carter. When he took office the country was in a depression and slowly headed towards civil war, and when he left it was out of the depression and on a slightly faster track to civil war. Call it a wash. Basically Bush had the misfortune to come after one of our few decent Presidents.

Verdict: Tyler was incompetent but passive, and fortunately America just kept chugging along without him, more or less. It’s pretty bad that he committed treason during the Civil War, but I guess that shouldn’t count against his Presidency. Bush is incompetent and active. His decision to ruin our foreign policy puts him out of reach for Tyler, even without the damning VRP factor. Bush is now at least the seventh-worst President.

Bonus anecdote about this amusing failure: Tyler’s Secretary of Navy and Secretary of State were on a battleship for a ceremonial cruise when a gun blew up and killed them both instantly. A young belle named Julia Gardiner was on board that day, and when her father exploded and died, she fainted into the arms of JOHN TYLER. Four months later they got married.

Bush vs. Worst: Part III

Ronald Reagan. Is he really one of the ten worst Presidents ever? Eh, maybe. But he’s definitely more fun to talk about than Fillmore.

Foreign Policy: Reagan has one hell of a mixed bag on this one. On the good side, he was reasonably competent in the Israel-Lebanon war, had a pointless victory in Grenada (but at least he won), and, most important, shifted away from his own dumbassed belligerence to embrace Gorbachev’s efforts at reform. In other words, he was an appeaser. He appeased. This actually did help end the Cold War; that is, appeasement did. In other news, he ruined everything he touched in Latin America, including funding the Contras, a terrorist group. This policy would later be denounced as “state-sponsored terrorism” by some, and the World Court sanctioned us for it. But did Reagan stop? No. Nor did he stop his terrible policies in Colombia, Panama, Guatemala and especially El Salvador. But did Communism ever take hold in those places? No, because everyone was dead. Reagan also funded the Mujahedeen and Saddam Hussein in addition to illegally selling arms to Iran.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? Reagan gets more credit for ending the Cold War than he deserves, often by people who think it was his ludicrous tough-guy posturing rather than his return to basic diplomacy that did it, but at least it’s something good. Bush has just continually ruined everything.

Domestic Policy: Here the bag is less mixed. Reagan believed in small government, or government that provides few services to anyone while still running a massive budget and trade deficit. The economy did pretty well in the 80s, although Reagan contributed to the Savings and Loan scandal (see below!) and the stock market crash of 1987. He also completely ignored the environment, as well as AIDS. He believed that the government should have a bloated, wasteful military-industrial complex and War on Drugs, and he made those dreams a reality. He did make people feel good about America, though, which counts for something (very little).
DBDSW? Bush’s commitment to combating AIDS may be his biggest domestic strength. He’s probably been worse overall on the economy and environment. He hasn’t turned as many government programs into ineffective sinkholes as Reagan did, but Reagan never spied on his own citizens. Well, the AIDS thing is pretty big, so Bush wins this by a slim margin.

Civil Rights: Reagan was a casual racist who opposed the Civil Rights Act back in 1964. He started his 1980 campaign by going to a Southern town known for its racist terrorism and talking about states’ rights. Some would say that his policy of crushing the poor disproportionately affected minorities.
DBDSW? Katrina was a bigger racist failure than any one thing I can think of from Reagan, but Reagan had more harmful policies in general. I’d say Reagan wins this one by a small margin.

Corruption: The big scandals were the HUD controversy (pretty bad), Iran-Contra (one of the worst ever), EPA scandal (just regular bad) and the Savings & Loan Crisis (some believe it is the worst financial scandal in American history).
DBDSW? I listed the Bush scandals last time. He has more, but let’s try to compare the biggest from each. I’d say Torture-gate defeats the Iran-Contra scandal because it has ruined our ability to prosecute terrorism and involves war crimes (well, more war crimes). But Savings & Loan is worse than wiretapping, although it’s probably less Reagan’s fault. Bush has a deeper bench on this one, though, so he’s worse than Reagan overall.

VRP: Finally Reagan gets some big points on Bush. Where Bush inarguably took America to hell via a handbasket after a decent Presidency, Reagan did a mixed job after another terrible Presidency. Carter isn’t as bad as some people think, but he was bad. America could rest assured that Reagan was merely assuming control of a sinking ship, whereas Bush was steering a pretty good ship into the mouth of a volcano.

Verdict: This turned out to be much closer than I initially expected; Reagan was actually pretty awful. His work in Latin America was terrible stuff that ruined nations and left thousands upon thousands dead. But he did some things right, and America was doing much better at the close of his term than it is now. Bush is worse.

Coming Next: The drop-off to the next guy is amazing.

The list so far:
10. John Adams
9. Ronald Reagan
8. George W. Bush
7. ‽‽‽‽‽‽

Bush Vs. Worst: Part II

This is part two of our ongoing series comparing George W. Bush with the worst U.S. Presidents of all history. Today, the ninth worst President: Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant is an interesting case because he isn’t actually that bad a President. We’ve mostly included him here because he usually ranks pretty low and I feel like talking about him. This might be the longest of these posts because I like Grant.

Domestic Policy: In Grant’s day the South was dominated by racist terrorists who frequently killed black people and tried to overthrow their own governments. Grant reestablished order there, more or less. He staunchly supported rights for black people, the rule of law, and the 14th and 15th amendments. He also defeated the KKK. On the economy he was pretty good. The Panic of 1873 was bad, and he could have done more about that, but he also reformed the Treasury, ran it at a surplus, cut the national debt, improved national credit, reduced annual interest rates, and swung the trade deficit to a surplus. He was a big supporter of free education for all and of keeping church and state separate, especially in schools.
Did Bush Do Something Worse?
Bush hasn’t confronted any domestic crises on the level of the Post-Civil-War South, which is understandable, but seriously, it’s hard to think of a single domestic accomplishment for him.

Foreign policy: Oversaw the Treaty of Washington. Probably the best U.S. treaty of the 19th century, it resolved every standing dispute with England at terms highly favorable to the U.S., and the two nations have never fought since. He managed to avoid a pointless war with Cuba even though there was a lot of popular demand for it. He also tried to annex the Dominican Republic, because most people there wanted it, it was a useful bargaining chip in securing black rights in the U.S., and it would have put pressure on Cuba to outlaw slavery. But Congress said no. Also settled the Liberian-Grebo war, whatever that was.
DBDSW?
Again, Grant seems to have done mostly good things, so Bush is a pretty obvious loser here.

Civil Rights: Grant was a major supporter of rights for freed slaves, and made political sacrifices to uphold them even after it became unpopular. Because he forced the South to let blacks vote, under his tenure black people actually got elected to national office. Also, again, he defeated the KKK. The U.S. didn’t catch up to the civil rights of his term until the 1950s. His Native American policies were more progressive than anything America would do until 1924. In fact, his low rankings on most Presidential lists probably have something to do with his having held more progressive views than the next century or so of historians.
DBDSW?
Although his callous disregard for civil rights is pretty typical for post-Southern-Strategy Republicans, he went the extra mile by screwing Katrina victims. Bush seems to have arguably less enlightened racial views than a President from the mid-19th century.

Corruption: This is where Grant was pretty terrible. The major scandals of his terms were Black Friday, the Whiskey Ring, the Sanborn incident, and Crédit Mobilier of America scandal. He didn’t have anything to do with any of them, nor did they profit him at all, and that kind of crap was pretty common in national politics of the time. But he should have exercised better judgment in appointing and oversight, and he should have punished offenders more.
DBDSW?
I’m not sure what counts as a scandal for this guy, but off the top of my head, his administration has had the Plame scandal, the lying about WMDs thing, the illegal domestic wire tapping thing, the approval of torture and subsequent cover up thing, the various other things that are technically war crimes, the cronyism that helped make Katrina worse, the illegal hirings/firings at the Justice Department, and probably other things that I’m forgetting or that we haven’t discovered yet. Bush was involved in many of these directly and has handled all of them at least as poorly as Grant handled his, and many of the Bush scandals are directly injurious to people, not an “Oh this sends a bad message and hurts the economy” kind of hurt, but an “Oh, this waterboards an innocent person” kind of hurt.

Value of Replacement Player: Grant replaced Andrew Johnson, a terrible, terrible man and an even worse President. America improved drastically with the change.
DBDSW? Clinton was alright, and America is clearly much worse under Bush, so Bush loses this category by a wide margin.

Verdict: This isn’t even close. On the one hand, the comparison is kind of unfair, because Grant was actually a pretty good President. I value Civil Rights enough to put him in my top ten, although the scandals were pretty terrible. On the other hand, it's amazing to see how utterly horrible Bush is compared with a decent leader. Bush is at least the ninth-worst of all time. Also, Adams is back in the top ten, because I'm taking Grant out of it now that I got to talk about him.

Bush vs. Worst: Round 1

This is the first post in a new feature comparing George W. Bush to the ten worst U.S. Presidents of all history. First up, the tenth-worst: John Adams.
Adams was a decent founding father, but his Presidency was terrible. Let's break it down.

Foreign Policy: He ruined the Jay Treaty, which was brilliant policy conceived by Hamilton and Washington that kept us out of war with France. Combined with the XYZ affair this helped pave the way to many of the foreign policy disasters of the next decade or so.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? Yes. The Iraq War. Bush is also technically a war criminal.

Domestic policy: His most famous move here was the Alien and Sedition Act, which, although it was racist and bad for immigration, also destroyed free speech.
DBDSW? Yes. The Patriot Act, though better on paper, has been enforced and manipulated a lot more and will be difficult to undo. The Gitmo proceedings have ruined our ability to prosecute terrorists.

Civil Rights: Didn't do much to help slaves, but he probably couldn't have done too much.
DBDSW? Eh, call this a toss-up.

Corruption: Adams wasn't historically terrible on this.
DBDSW? Yes. Bush is historically terrible on this.

Value of Replacement Player: This is a concept from sports statistics. If you replace, say, Lebron James with an average player, that's actually a deficit for your team. So a bad President is even worse if he replaces a good President. Adams replaces George Washington. That's a hell of a drop, since Washington is one of our only three excellent Presidents. In fact, the Adams Presidency makes Washington's achievements all the more remarkable, since so many of them survived his terrible successor.
DBDSW? Clinton was basically historically average. America was doing fine when Bush took over, in a weaker economy, but basically OK. Now America is in an even worse economy and also involved in two Asian land wars. Clinton was no Washington, but I'd say Bush loses this one. Replacing Michael Jordan with Ray Allen is tough, but replacing Allen with a guy who throws the ball into the stands is even worse. So Adams wins this one.

Verdict: Bush is worse on every count except Civil Rights, which is a toss-up. He is at least the tenth worst President. Congrats to John Adams, who finally escapes the bottom ten.