I’m all for a discussion of the historic ranking of presidents, but please make that it’s own thread.
You people throwing out “top 5, top 3 president,” or bottom whatever, have absolutely no sense of context or history.
Washington built what we accept as presidential norms from scratch. Lincoln held the Union together through sheer force of will through the country’s most divisive, existential crisis. FDR was a 4 term president that navigated through the worst economic depression, and won the biggest war in the history of this planet. …And that’s a long history full of LOTS of wars.
Franklin Pierce and James Buchanan cowardly kicked the slavery can down the road at a time where it was political suicide to be a moderate and try to seek middle ground. Andrew Johnson’s opinions of racial and social hierarchy are well-documented. Herbert Hoover was bought and paid for by business and industry titans, in an age of even greater wealth and power inequality, when it all ended in tears.
So to say Obama was a top 5, maybe top 3 president of all time, or that Trump is the greatest crisis this country has ever faced in it’s long history, from your air-conditioned perspective of a free high school education, vaccines, and smartphones… it all smacks of a careless insouciance that is ignorant of just what we’ve been through to get to here.
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Start here
Insouciance implies careless—when you go for a pedantic smack down get your diction right bro. Also try reading. I called Florida Man the greatest domestic political crisis since the Civil War, which is a far smaller subset of crises than ‘greatest crisis this country ever faced’. Also it’s fucking cold here, why would I have the AC on?
Also its not it’s.
That’s a bad thing.
And you only got to 3 Presidents you seem to rank over Obama.
Also one of the biggest things I learned form that wikipedia is that Reagan and Jackson have historically been criminally overrated… and Grant is easily the most underrated president.
That being said I don’t think Obama is top 5 either. Bottom half of the top quartile imo. He got dealt a bad hand and played it competently but not spectacularly. Too risk averse and too aware of his legacy.
He got dealt a great hand. He started with control over almost every lever of power in the country.
I have a low tolerance for excuses when you start with ~all the power. If some of the Democratic senators “might as well have been Republicans” then it was Obama’s job to make them shrivel in fear if they crossed him. If Mitch was very effective it was Obama’s job to be very effective in return.
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Mitch McConnell was only Senate Majority Leader for 2 out of Obama’s 8 years.
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Thanks to the filibuster that’s a terrible metric. Presidents don’t have super powers. I want to be very clear that I’m not some huge Obama fanboy. I think he made a lot of mistakes, but I also think they were understandable, that he had a lot of hard choices to make, and he ran like shit.
It might not have been the best option but it killed far fewer people than Bill Clinton’s sanctions in Iraq and it did accomplish something.
Regarding Truman and the bomb
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This is an excellent post about why I never want to be president.
Truman being that high in those president rankings is fucking ridiculous. How many people did he kill with the atomic bomb?
Not as many as died in fire bombings
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this being america, the answer there for many is “not enough”
That’s an arguable choice that has had a ton of consequences beyond the casualties. Certainly not pure evil. The number of people who would have died if we had invaded Japan… probably way more.
Additionally every world leader got to see the destructive potential of nuclear weapons… and they haven’t had a war between major powers since.
If you’re going to kill an absurd number of civilians in a flash of light you could have worse long term results and you could do it to people who deserved it quite a bit less than the Japanese in 1945.
Dumb guy question from Team It Was Pure Evil, couldn’t he have dropped the fucking bomb on an unpopulated or sparsely populated area in Japan, instead of killing 200k people? They would still see the entire landscape and whatever few buildings were in the area got completely wrecked.
I’m definitely on team ‘it was pretty evil’ fwiw. The earlier poster who said that we killed more people with firebombs in the weeks before was unfortunately right though. We were actively bombing their civilian areas at the time looking to inflict maximum damage. We were looking to maximize their civilian casualties to cause them to surrender asap.
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The US only had two bombs (unbeknownst to the Japanese). Dropping one on a city did not impress the Japanese enough to surrender. It took a second bombing three days later when they had to fear that one city after another will be hit .
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The only point I make on this topic is that dropping atomic bombs wasn’t in some special way worse than what the US was already doing, they were already bombing the shit out of Japanese civilians with conventional bombs with equal devastation.
"If war with the Japanese does come, we’ll fight mercilessly,” General George C. Marshall told news reporters in an off-the-record briefing on November 15, 1941, three weeks before Pearl Harbor. “Flying Fortresses will be dispatched immediately to set the paper cities of Japan on fire. There won’t be any hesitation about bombing civilians—it will be all-out.” More than three years of brutal global warfare would pass before Marshall’s prediction came true, but come true it did on the night of March 9-10, 1945.