The Greatest President in 100 Years

[rightwinger]

I wonder what the rating criteria the average citizen uses for judging presidents? Is it just a good or bad feeling, or even something good or bad that we remember, some little incident or even a cliche or little bon mot. Is it a reflection of Limbaugh or Maddow or just what? Books have been written about the way ordinary citizens judge presidents and they way historians judge presidents. For ordinary citizens I would say that we judge the way we voted, and the way we voted is determined by our political party.
Do historians use the same criteria as ordinary citizens or do they have a different criteria, more objective, can they defy their political party and political beliefs?

My criteria are simple

1. What challenges did you face as President?
2. How did you respond to those challenges?
3. What was the lasting impact of your presidency?

 

[Meathead]

There are those who changed not only America, but the world FDR, Reagan. The top two. One who tried to change America and the world but failed, Wilson. The rest were simply caretakers of various degree of competence and accomplishment.

 

[rightwinger]

There are those who changed not only America, but the world FDR, Reagan. The top two. One who tried to change America and the world but failed, Wilson. The rest were simply caretakers of various degree of competence and accomplishment.

George W Bush tried to change the world

He had visions of inserting Democracy into Southwest Asia and initiating a regional revolution for democracy. He invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq and installed democracies. He failed in that he he did not anticipate the resulting internal power struggles and the extent of loss of lives to Americans.

 

[oldfart]

Reagans star is fading as the impact of his "economic revolution" is being felt by millions of Americans

The Trickle Down bubble has burst

Let's see, Reagan till 1988, 4 years Bush I, 8 years Clinton, 8 years Bush II, sure, I see your point. Doe anyone really expect unparalleled economic growth into perpetuity? It's a bit like blaming Eisenhower for the Carter recession. It's feeble, give it up and maybe your pain will ebb.

Generally I agree with you that economic policies have effects in the one-year to three-year range and a few policies have a more long-term effect. But the "statute of limitations" on blaming (or crediting) a particular president for the performance of the economy should run out two or three years after they leave office.

The exception should be presidents who claim a legacy of a fundamental shift in how economic policy is formulated. By this standard, FDR's influence for good or ill stretches far beyond his terms in office. LBJ and Ronald Reagan also fall into this category, IMHO.

With Reagan, I think the economic legacy still animates the Republican Party and is influential today. If you want the positive legacy, you have to also accept the ongoing effects of those shifts in the attitude toward governance. Reagan's legacy attitude toward government and political economy had several facets:

1. "High" income tax rates have a disincentive effect on personal effort and therefore had to be drastically reduced (top rate from 70% to 35%).

2. The government is not part of the solution to economic problems; it is mainly the problem. This justifies drastically reduced regulation of business and major cuts in non-military spending programs.

3. The social safety net can be severely cut without severe economic consequences.

4. Tax cuts and military buildups do not have to be paid for; deficits for these purposes do not matter economically.

Part of this is ideology and part is testable economic theory. Viewed as testable economic theory, each of the above four points seems to me to be vulnerable, but I concede that someone could argue that the policy was right even if carrying it to far might have serious adverse consequences.

As ideology, it is what it is.

So I don't see an argument that Reagan's economic policies drove American economic history much into the 90's; but if anyone wants to dismiss the negative (or positive) aspects of his economic philosophy, they have to throw it all out, not just the part they don't like.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I oughta pos rep PoliticalChic just for using "jejune" in a post here at USMB.

Kinda wasted on the likes of Synthia, though.

Can we just take away her thesaurus privileges?

An admission that my vocabulary is greater than yours???

Bravo.


Now....for all the other areas in which I leave you in the dust.
C'mon....confession is good for he soul.

 

[PoliticalChic]

I oughta pos rep PoliticalChic just for using "jejune" in a post here at USMB.

Kinda wasted on the likes of Synthia, though.

Can we just take away her thesaurus privileges?

That would be as bad as taking away her "Rightclick copy" privileges

Green with envy?

 

[Dugdale_Jukes]

Today is the birthday of Ronald Reagan.

February 6, 1911

1. "In spite of all the evidence that points to the free market as the most efficient system, we continue down a road that is bearing out the prophecy of De Tocqueville, ...if we weren't constantly on guard, we would find ourselves covered by a network of regulations controlling every activity. [Tocqueville] said if that came to pass we would one day find ourselves a nation of timid animals with government the shepherd.

It all comes down to this basic premise: if you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom and in fact all freedom. Freedom is something that cannot be passed on genetically. It is never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it. Once freedom is gone, it's gone for a long, long time. Already, too many of us, particularly those in business and industry, have chosen to switch rather than fight."
Ronald Reagan, 1978
Hillsdale College - Imprimis Issue



2. "The liberal press called upon Reagan to remove the tactical nuclear arsenal from Europe. Europeans fell easy prey to the false theory that a nuclear war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO in Europe would remain inside the continent. Freeze supporters here in the U.S. clamored that the strategic arsenal based inside America was more than enough to stop any attack in Germany.

The Hollywood establishment labeled Reagan a reckless "cowboy" who would press the nuclear button at the drop of a hat. The wide liberal criticism openly insulted Reagan as a senile fool who could carry the world into global nuclear war.

Reagan did not give in. Instead of caving to the political pressure, Reagan went against the polls, against the liberal media and against Hollywood's advice to disarm in the face of the Soviet threat. Reagan opted instead to match Moscow's firepower and up the ante. "
The Legacy of Ronald Reagan – Peace




3."SO ON WHOM or what do we bestow the title of the "evil empire's" killer? Was it Mikhail Gorbachev himself who pulled down what Lenin and Stalin had built up? It is tempting to finger Gorbachev, but this would ascribe too much wisdom and foresight to a man who wanted merely to reform, but not to relinquish, the empire. At no point, however, did Gorbachev want to yield Moscow's pride of place as the number two superpower. And he was blissfully confident that the risks were tolerable: "There is no reason to fear the collapse or the end of socialism", Gorbachev assured Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu three weeks after the Berlin Wall had been breached and three weeks before the Romanian dictator was executed by his own people.

Reagan was made from far sterner stuff than was his Soviet counterpart. His genial grin and wise-cracking demeanor concealed a spine of steel when push came to shove. Yet at their next meeting in Reykjavik in 1986, where Gorbachev would not budge on the "Star Wars" question, Reagan was decisive and unforgiving. He recalls in An American Life how he stood up from the table to proclaim that the meeting was over. Then he turned to his Secretary of State: "Let's go, George. We're leaving." Like any good diplomat, Shultz was crushed by so much roughness, but Reagan was completely unfazed. Later on, he explained: "I went to Reykjavik determined that everything was negotiable except two things, our freedom and our future."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_77/ai_n6353166/pg_6/?tag=content;col1




4. Ronald Reagan, though dismissed by Europeans as a second-rate actor and fondler of cue cards, possessed that magic faculty that separates run-of-the mill politicos from history-molding leaders. "I didn't understand", recalls Time's Joe Klein, "how truly monumental, and morally important, Reagan's anti-communism was until I visited the Soviet Union in 1987." He continues with a seemingly trivial vignette. Attending the Bolshoi Ballet, he was nudged by his minder: "'Ronald Reagan. Evil empire', he whispered with dramatic intensity and shot a glance toward his lap where he had hidden two enthusiastic thumbs up. 'Yes!'"

When an American president manages to pluck the soul strings of those who have been raised to fear and despise what he represents, he surely deserves the honorific 'great.'

Ronald Reagan.

On being asked why he so admired a bobble headed idiot like Reagan, a high school friend with similar military experience actually said: "He made me feel like my [military service] mattered. He made me feel good about it."

That shook me. That a filthy god damned scum like Reagan, an icon to halfwits pretending to understand economics and human cattle grazing their way toward the sound of the hammer, meant something to a veteran of something besides movies, about made me sick. I asked him, "Can you really have been that worthless as a soldier, to need a glad-handing New Dealer posing as a Republican to prop you up?"

He was upset. Told him to get back with me when he regained his sanity. The day a hollywood hack who got the presidency by grabbing his ankles for Don Regan can add something to my feelings about my military service is not going to come.

The best presidents since 1900 are in this order:

TR - understood the evils of monopolies AND big government
FDR - didn't get carried away with spending in peacetime
Truman - first president to propose a national health care system
IKE - warned against militarizing the economy

Worst presidents since 1900, worst first, are...

1. Junebug Bush - halfwit inheritor and bottom feeding scum; family was resigned to pressing friends to help support him before Karl Rove saw an easy mark and bent Junior over the neocon sawhorse.

2. Ronald Reagan - New Dealer talked shit to nutballs; expanded the federal government; signed pay parity bills; tripled the debt shadow boxing a bankrupt empire still farming with horses when fuel was short; first wall street bailout; first bank bailout; told war stories from his movies like he was in the war. Basically a no good rotten son of a bitch all the way. His only redeeming feature is he fooled millions of nutballs into thinking he was a Republican.

3. Clinton - a real Reagan Republican with enough evangelical chops to fool fake liberals into believing he was a Democrat. Signed NAFTA, sent more jobs offshore than any president in history, undid Glass-Steagall, deregulated essential commodities, pardoned a dangerous economic criminal Marc Rich, and for good measure degraded the office of the president for living memory. Only human to have legally banked over a hundred million dollars in ten years without improving a process, inventing something or creating a single private sector job.

There are no other presidents in the last 100 years close enough to the level of debauchery of the American Dream to place on this list. Richard Nixon can now rest in peace.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Today is the birthday of Ronald Reagan.

February 6, 1911

1. "In spite of all the evidence that points to the free market as the most efficient system, we continue down a road that is bearing out the prophecy of De Tocqueville, ...if we weren't constantly on guard, we would find ourselves covered by a network of regulations controlling every activity. [Tocqueville] said if that came to pass we would one day find ourselves a nation of timid animals with government the shepherd.

It all comes down to this basic premise: if you lose your economic freedom, you lose your political freedom and in fact all freedom. Freedom is something that cannot be passed on genetically. It is never more than one generation away from extinction. Every generation has to learn how to protect and defend it. Once freedom is gone, it's gone for a long, long time. Already, too many of us, particularly those in business and industry, have chosen to switch rather than fight."
Ronald Reagan, 1978
Hillsdale College - Imprimis Issue



2. "The liberal press called upon Reagan to remove the tactical nuclear arsenal from Europe. Europeans fell easy prey to the false theory that a nuclear war between the Warsaw Pact and NATO in Europe would remain inside the continent. Freeze supporters here in the U.S. clamored that the strategic arsenal based inside America was more than enough to stop any attack in Germany.

The Hollywood establishment labeled Reagan a reckless "cowboy" who would press the nuclear button at the drop of a hat. The wide liberal criticism openly insulted Reagan as a senile fool who could carry the world into global nuclear war.

Reagan did not give in. Instead of caving to the political pressure, Reagan went against the polls, against the liberal media and against Hollywood's advice to disarm in the face of the Soviet threat. Reagan opted instead to match Moscow's firepower and up the ante. "
The Legacy of Ronald Reagan – Peace




3."SO ON WHOM or what do we bestow the title of the "evil empire's" killer? Was it Mikhail Gorbachev himself who pulled down what Lenin and Stalin had built up? It is tempting to finger Gorbachev, but this would ascribe too much wisdom and foresight to a man who wanted merely to reform, but not to relinquish, the empire. At no point, however, did Gorbachev want to yield Moscow's pride of place as the number two superpower. And he was blissfully confident that the risks were tolerable: "There is no reason to fear the collapse or the end of socialism", Gorbachev assured Romanian leader Nicolae Ceausescu three weeks after the Berlin Wall had been breached and three weeks before the Romanian dictator was executed by his own people.

Reagan was made from far sterner stuff than was his Soviet counterpart. His genial grin and wise-cracking demeanor concealed a spine of steel when push came to shove. Yet at their next meeting in Reykjavik in 1986, where Gorbachev would not budge on the "Star Wars" question, Reagan was decisive and unforgiving. He recalls in An American Life how he stood up from the table to proclaim that the meeting was over. Then he turned to his Secretary of State: "Let's go, George. We're leaving." Like any good diplomat, Shultz was crushed by so much roughness, but Reagan was completely unfazed. Later on, he explained: "I went to Reykjavik determined that everything was negotiable except two things, our freedom and our future."
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2751/is_77/ai_n6353166/pg_6/?tag=content;col1




4. Ronald Reagan, though dismissed by Europeans as a second-rate actor and fondler of cue cards, possessed that magic faculty that separates run-of-the mill politicos from history-molding leaders. "I didn't understand", recalls Time's Joe Klein, "how truly monumental, and morally important, Reagan's anti-communism was until I visited the Soviet Union in 1987." He continues with a seemingly trivial vignette. Attending the Bolshoi Ballet, he was nudged by his minder: "'Ronald Reagan. Evil empire', he whispered with dramatic intensity and shot a glance toward his lap where he had hidden two enthusiastic thumbs up. 'Yes!'"

When an American president manages to pluck the soul strings of those who have been raised to fear and despise what he represents, he surely deserves the honorific 'great.'

Ronald Reagan.

On being asked why he so admired a bobble headed idiot like Reagan, a high school friend with similar military experience actually said: "He made me feel like my [military service] mattered. He made me feel good about it."

That shook me. That a filthy god damned scum like Reagan, an icon to halfwits pretending to understand economics and human cattle grazing their way toward the sound of the hammer, meant something to a veteran of something besides movies, about made me sick. I asked him, "Can you really have been that worthless as a soldier, to need a glad-handing New Dealer posing as a Republican to prop you up?"

He was upset. Told him to get back with me when he regained his sanity. The day a hollywood hack who got the presidency by grabbing his ankles for Don Regan can add something to my feelings about my military service is not going to come.

The best presidents since 1900 are in this order:

TR - understood the evils of monopolies AND big government
FDR - didn't get carried away with spending in peacetime
Truman - first president to propose a national health care system
IKE - warned against militarizing the economy

Worst presidents since 1900, worst first, are...

1. Junebug Bush - halfwit inheritor and bottom feeding scum; family was resigned to pressing friends to help support him before Karl Rove saw an easy mark and bent Junior over the neocon sawhorse.

2. Ronald Reagan - New Dealer talked shit to nutballs; expanded the federal government; signed pay parity bills; tripled the debt shadow boxing a bankrupt empire still farming with horses when fuel was short; first wall street bailout; first bank bailout; told war stories from his movies like he was in the war. Basically a no good rotten son of a bitch all the way. His only redeeming feature is he fooled millions of nutballs into thinking he was a Republican.

3. Clinton - a real Reagan Republican with enough evangelical chops to fool fake liberals into believing he was a Democrat. Signed NAFTA, sent more jobs offshore than any president in history, undid Glass-Steagall, deregulated essential commodities, pardoned a dangerous economic criminal Marc Rich, and for good measure degraded the office of the president for living memory. Only human to have legally banked over a hundred million dollars in ten years without improving a process, inventing something or creating a single private sector job.

There are no other presidents in the last 100 years close enough to the level of debauchery of the American Dream to place on this list. Richard Nixon can now rest in peace.

From post #195:

1. And the tax cuts of the Economic Recovery Act of 1981 stimulated economic growth. “As a 1982 JEC study pointed out,[1] similar across-the-board tax cuts had been implemented in the 1920s as the Mellon tax cuts, and in the 1960s as the Kennedy tax cuts. In both cases the reduction of high marginal tax rates actually increased tax payments by "the rich," also increasing their share of total individual income taxes paid.” http://www.house.gov/jec/fiscal/tx-g...t/reagtxct.htm



2. “As inflation came down and as more and more of the tax cuts from the 1981 Act went into effect, the economic began a strong and sustained pattern of growth.” US Department of the Treasury



3. The benefits from Reaganomics:

a. The economy grew at a 3.4% average rate…compared with 2.9% for the previous eight years, and 2.7% for the next eight.(Table B-4)
b. Inflation rate dropped from 12.5% to 4.4%. (Table B-63)
c. Unemployment fell to 5.5% from 7.1% (Table B-35)
d. Prime interest rate fell by one-third.(Table B-73)
e. The S & P 500 jumped 124% (Table B-95) FDsys - Browse ERP

f. Charitable contributions rose 57% faster than inflation. Dinesh D’Souza, “Ronald Reagan: How an Ordinary May Became an Extraordinary Leader,” p. 116

 

[Dugdale_Jukes]

Reagan inherited an industrial economy in a rough patch. Nothing could have held the US economy back in the early 1980s, although Reagan's hilariously keynesian supply side (in the words of Pap Bush "voodoo" economics) did extend the recession of 1981-82.

Reagan's legacy is an asset-based economy fueled by credit. The Wizard of Oz had more going on than people claiming credit for the credit financed economy of the 1990s. I am laughing out loud at the nutball fantasy ReagaNUTics had a good day. A single good day. And so are serious Zionist neocons.

There isn't enough bullshit (see, "correlation is not cause") in the nutball handbook and there aren't enough neocon think tanks to fool anyone with enough on the ball to pour piss out of a boot while reading the heel label.

But thanks for playing. You probably think Clinton was a Democrat because that's what the label said. Public education since (Reagan fed into the pay parity bogusness) has a lot to answer for is the bottom line.

Reagan was a joke. A joke on America.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Reagan inherited an industrial economy in a rough patch. Nothing could have held the US economy back in the early 1980s, although Reagan's hilariously keynesian supply side nonsense did extend the recession of 1981.

Reagan's legacy is an asset-based economy fueled by credit. The Wizard of Oz had more going on than people claiming credit for the credit financed economy of the 1990s. I am laughing out loud at the nutball fantasy ReagaNUTics had a good day. A single good day. And so are serious Zionist neocons.

There isn't enough bullshit (see, "correlation is not cause") in the nutball handbook and there aren't enough neocon think tanks to fool anyone with enough on the ball to pour piss out of a boot while reading the heel label.

But thanks for playing. You probably think Clinton was a Democrat because that's what the label said. Public education since (Reagan fed into the pay parity bogusness) has a lot to answer for is the bottom line.

Reagan was a joke. A joke on America.

"You probably think Clinton was a Democrat because.....blah, blah, blah....."

No, actually...
...I simply think you're a dunce.


It's clear due to your avoidance of Reagan's amazing turning around of the economy.



"But thanks for playing."
How clever....could you possibly be any more of a clichéd?

 

[Dugdale_Jukes]

Reagan inherited an industrial economy in a rough patch. Nothing could have held the US economy back in the early 1980s, although Reagan's hilariously keynesian supply side nonsense did extend the recession of 1981.

Reagan's legacy is an asset-based economy fueled by credit. The Wizard of Oz had more going on than people claiming credit for the credit financed economy of the 1990s. I am laughing out loud at the nutball fantasy ReagaNUTics had a good day. A single good day. And so are serious Zionist neocons.

There isn't enough bullshit (see, "correlation is not cause") in the nutball handbook and there aren't enough neocon think tanks to fool anyone with enough on the ball to pour piss out of a boot while reading the heel label.

But thanks for playing. You probably think Clinton was a Democrat because that's what the label said. Public education since (Reagan fed into the pay parity bogusness) has a lot to answer for is the bottom line.

Reagan was a joke. A joke on America.

"You probably think Clinton was a Democrat because.....blah, blah, blah....."

No, actually...
...I simply think you're a dunce.


It's clear due to your avoidance of Reagan's amazing turning around of the economy.



"But thanks for playing."
How clever....could you possibly be any more of a clichéd?

Who's the dunce, here, babe? Someone stupid enough to believe Reagan turned the economy around, or someone that understands the horsepower of the greatest industrial nation ever to be sold out by a bobble headed idiot?

If you have enough emotional self control to read the facts on Reagan here they are:

1. Tripled the debt
2. Signed pay parity bills
3. Expanded the federal government in size and power while at the same time convincing morons he was doing the opposite
4. First finance sector bailouts (S&Ls, and it was during Reagan's presidency that the Fed started buying private sector paper for the purpose of propping up markets - all the while braying about the purity of markets).
5. Expanded direct corporate welfare beyond Nixon's "revenue sharing" horseshit to state and local governments, possibly the stupidest people ever to bumble into "other people's money".
6. Continued on purpose what the moron, LBJ, started by accident - returning the MIC to the biggest lobby buying congressscum
7. Lied about his military service (although by the time he praised Nazi war heroes at Bitzberg, he was getting senile).

What can possibly be more cliched than gaggles of halfwits following a charismatic to a bad place, then spending the rest of their lives in denial and publicly suppressing buyer's remorse by bragging about their love of the charismatic?

All in all, while bovine America basked in the evangelical skills of a man wrapped in the flag and surrounded by religious nuts, many rational Americans understood that corporations had finally got their man into the white house.

The only reason I paid any attention to the man was to see if a big time Democrat would blow him on camera. For those with the chops to run the numbers and connect cause-effect dots, it can't be missed that it was during the Reagan presidency that America lost its way. All it takes is integrity to admit it. Go ahead, try it. One imagines it won't be the worst morning after of your life.

Next.

 

[Synthaholic]

I wonder what the rating criteria the average citizen uses for judging presidents? Is it just a good or bad feeling, or even something good or bad that we remember, some little incident or even a cliche or little bon mot. Is it a reflection of Limbaugh or Maddow or just what? Books have been written about the way ordinary citizens judge presidents and they way historians judge presidents. For ordinary citizens I would say that we judge the way we voted, and the way we voted is determined by our political party.
Do historians use the same criteria as ordinary citizens or do they have a different criteria, more objective, can they defy their political party and political beliefs?

My criteria are simple

1. What challenges did you face as President?
2. How did you respond to those challenges?
3. What was the lasting impact of your presidency?

I would add:

4. Did you leave the country in better shape than you found it.

 

[Synthaholic]

Can we just take away her thesaurus privileges?

That would be as bad as taking away her "Rightclick copy" privileges

Green with envy?

More like 'flush with originality'.

Take a lesson, parrot.

 

[CrusaderFrank]

I wonder what the rating criteria the average citizen uses for judging presidents? Is it just a good or bad feeling, or even something good or bad that we remember, some little incident or even a cliche or little bon mot. Is it a reflection of Limbaugh or Maddow or just what? Books have been written about the way ordinary citizens judge presidents and they way historians judge presidents. For ordinary citizens I would say that we judge the way we voted, and the way we voted is determined by our political party.
Do historians use the same criteria as ordinary citizens or do they have a different criteria, more objective, can they defy their political party and political beliefs?

My criteria are simple

1. What challenges did you face as President?
2. How did you respond to those challenges?
3. What was the lasting impact of your presidency?

I would add:

4. Did you leave the country in better shape than you found it.

Good point. Reagan demolished your home team the USSR, no wonder you hate him

 

[Synthaholic]

My criteria are simple

1. What challenges did you face as President?
2. How did you respond to those challenges?
3. What was the lasting impact of your presidency?

I would add:

4. Did you leave the country in better shape than you found it.

Good point. Reagan demolished your home team the USSR, no wonder you hate him

The retard has awoken from his afternoon nap.

 

[Meathead]

There are those who changed not only America, but the world FDR, Reagan. The top two. One who tried to change America and the world but failed, Wilson. The rest were simply caretakers of various degree of competence and accomplishment.

George W Bush tried to change the world

He had visions of inserting Democracy into Southwest Asia and initiating a regional revolution for democracy. He invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq and installed democracies. He failed in that he he did not anticipate the resulting internal power struggles and the extent of loss of lives to Americans.

He was successful, however, in installing democratic institutions in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He did not change the world, but he damned sure changed those two countries.

 

[Synthaholic]

There are those who changed not only America, but the world FDR, Reagan. The top two. One who tried to change America and the world but failed, Wilson. The rest were simply caretakers of various degree of competence and accomplishment.

George W Bush tried to change the world

He had visions of inserting Democracy into Southwest Asia and initiating a regional revolution for democracy. He invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq and installed democracies. He failed in that he he did not anticipate the resulting internal power struggles and the extent of loss of lives to Americans.

He was successful, however, in installing democratic institutions in both Afghanistan and Iraq. He did not change the world, but he damned sure changed those two countries.

It was forced upon them. Let's see how long they keep it.

 

[oldfart]

I wonder what the rating criteria the average citizen uses for judging presidents? Is it just a good or bad feeling, or even something good or bad that we remember, some little incident or even a cliche or little bon mot. Is it a reflection of Limbaugh or Maddow or just what? Books have been written about the way ordinary citizens judge presidents and they way historians judge presidents. For ordinary citizens I would say that we judge the way we voted, and the way we voted is determined by our political party.

I think that some presidents leave more of an impression than others. These are the presidents that are loved and hated for what they did in the shared experience of those who lived through their era. Teddy Roosevelt will always be the Progressive Era, FDR the New Deal and recovery from the Depression, and Kennedy and Reagan are iconic for what people decided they stood for, whether that image is correct or not. As for Jimmy Carter and Calvin Coolidge, most people say "Meh".

Hopefully good historians stay away from the hagiography. I was born and raised in Springfield Illinois and have always been a student of Lincoln. I have come to the opinion that almost everything we "know" about Lincoln is wrong. Many of the stories that have been discounted by the likes of Sandburg turn out to be true, and Billy Herndon has been elevated from buffoon to great historical scholar. Some of the best Lincoln scholarship in the last hundred and fifty years has occurred in the last decade and a half. I sense that much the same could be said of many historical figures, which is why history is important and why each generation must put fresh eyes on the past and make an independent evaluation of presidents and other major figures. It keeps the game interesting.

Do historians use the same criteria as ordinary citizens or do they have a different criteria, more objective, can they defy their political party and political beliefs?

I think that good historians try to be relatively objective and share the values of their culture. The worst biases are those the historian never recognizes because they permeate their culture. There is always a debate about judging historical figures by contemporary standards. For example, those who claim Lincoln is a racist are using a term that would have no meaning in 1858. But the contrary is also false; there are some basic values that should be invariant over time, like respect for family units. Even Machievelli saw limits to what a sovereign could do and maintain control of his people.

Overall I think that historians in general apply the same values to evaluate a historical figure as the casual reader would. They probably question a bit more and make an effort to recognize bias and evaluate it. Of course, being able to avoid simplistic fallacies does not make anyone right, any more than being able to win an argument makes the position correct. That's a big part of the fun.

 

[oldfart]

I think LBJ had a great legislative resume with groundbreaking civil rights and poverty programs. But you can't discount his blunderous foreign policy decisions in executing the Viet Nam War when evaluating his presidency

Nixon as well had great accomplishments. But the impact of Watergate shook the country to the core and has to be considered his legacy

And apart from the unpleasantness in the second act; how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

 

[oldfart]

There are those who changed not only America, but the world FDR, Reagan. The top two. One who tried to change America and the world but failed, Wilson. The rest were simply caretakers of various degree of competence and accomplishment.

I have to agree on Wilson. I also think it is easy to miss the profound influence that Truman and Eisenhower made for good in the post-WWII world. Much of what is good in our society today is the result of their initiatives and values.