What Does It Take To Be Worse Than George W. Bush According To C-Span?

Well done! (0.00 / 0)

"The Judd Gregg of 1864."

Your summary has crystalized an observation about the list:

Everyone lower, and many higher, than GW Bush was a one-term President. Perhaps the historians gave a couple of points for getting re-elected - "How bad can he be, if his contemporaries re-hired him?"

GWB was ranked 36th 'best'. You have to go up to 27th to find a President who won re-election.

That was Richard M. Nixon.

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by: elwood @ Mon Feb 16, 2009 at 19:15:55 PM CST

Worst Lady ? Harding's Wife Ranks near bottom (0.00 / 0)

From the book , FLORENCE HARDING
The First Lady, the Jazz Age, and the Death of America's Most Scandalous President.
By Carl Sferrazza Anthony.
Illustrated. 645 pp. New York:
William Morrow & Company.

The blue-eyed, gray-haired, over-rouged, bespectacled First Lady with the black velvet neckband looked to all the world like the small-town Ohio matron she professed to be. Smart, ambitious, proper and prudish, Florence Kling Harding was the perfect partner for Warren G. Harding, the President who promised to return the nation to ''normalcy'' after the Great War. Or so it appeared. The real Florence Kling Harding story, as told by Carl Sferrazza Anthony in his biography, reads like the screenplay of a David Lynch film, with layer upon layer of suspicion, deception and deceit.

We learn that Florence Kling, before she became Mrs. Harding, had an illegitimate son whom she gave away to her own father in return for financial support. In 1891, at the age of 31, she married Warren Gamaliel Harding, a strikingly handsome 25-year-old newspaper publisher with a reputation for being ''an amiable rake.'' Thirty years later the Hardings moved into the White House, where Florence Kling (she never dropped her maiden name) Harding reigned as First Lady for the next two and a half years, until the mysterious death of her husband.

Since it is believed she burned many of her husband's papers, much of their affairs are unknown.

"Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public, that's what the poet does." Allen Ginsberg

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by: JonnyBBad @ Mon Feb 16, 2009 at 21:46:35 PM CST

"Good" And "Bad" Is Tough To Define, Historically (0.00 / 0)

There is a lot that a President does that doesn't get noticed, even by historians -- good and bad.  Sometimes historians, just like us, get wrapped up in the image of the man (hopefully we'll someday soon be able to say "man" or "woman.")  

And, of course, there are a lot of ways to "rate" a President.  The economy, foreign decisions that turned out good or bad and for how long, the state of human rights when the President was in office and what he did to improve them, plus the times in which they lived.  If George Washington or Thomas Jefferson owed their slaves in 1960, we'd think differently of them, wouldn't we.

In my book, I still rank George W. Bush on the very bottom.  He is responsible for the deaths of over 5,500 brave American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sent our armed services to attack another nation without provocation, resulting in the killing of tens of thousands of other people, and future hatred of our country -- all for no reason.  That to me means he's quite disgusting.

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by: Rep. Jim Splaine @ Mon Feb 16, 2009 at 21:58:48 PM CST

Bad call. (4.00 / 2)

A President who twiddled his thumbs for eight years would have been better than Bush, just like all six of those men were.  None of them created so many entirely new problems of such magnitude.

It's the difference between failing to prevent a war and lying to start a war for no reason.

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by: This Was The Moment @ Mon Feb 16, 2009 at 22:07:25 PM CST

Too close to call. (4.00 / 4)

I think history will be revised when there is more objectivity.

Bush was the worst president, and that will be told in the history yet to be written.

Pierce was a drunk, Harding a fool, etc., but as far as I know they did not preside over torture chambers. They did not knowingly try to destroy the environment. They did not put record numbers of law abiding American citizens under surveillance.

Think about it.

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by: Jennifer Daler @ Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 05:30:59 AM CST

on a bell curve, harrison would be in the middle (4.00 / 1)

the only way harrison slides to the bottom is if you're ranking presidents strictly on what they accomplished.  i don't actually know anything about harrison, but it's hard to imagine he brought enough negatives to the country in a month to rank below nixon, let alone gw.

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by: kite @ Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 11:42:38 AM CST

I Think That's Fair (4.00 / 2)

I don't understand why Harrison is viewed as negative or positive, he wasn't there long enough to really have had any lasting legacy.  

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by: Andrew Sylvia @ Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 12:17:31 PM CST

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Thta's how the survey worked - (0.00 / 0)

They ranked the Presidents on their effectiveness in ten areas. There was no concept of negative effectiveness suggested.

You and I would each get a 0, having spent 0 minutes accomplishing anything as President.

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by: elwood @ Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 19:10:54 PM CST

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That's How This Survey Worked (0.00 / 0)

Oh C'mon Elwood. Fess up, you can admit you're Jimmy Carter now :)

Seriously though, that's how this survey worked, but it doesn't have to be that way in every survey. I didn't agree with C-Span's assessment on Harrison.  

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by: Andrew Sylvia @ Tue Feb 17, 2009 at 20:34:53 PM CST

[ Parent ]