Whose the most over-rated president we ever had?

[WI_DEM]

I got to think of this question thanks to that other thread on "Greatest presidents"--who do you think is overrated?

I vote for St. Ronnie and sorry, JFK.

[Virginia Dare]

1. St. Ronnie is a good choice...

I vote for James Madison as one of the most under rated.

[AverageJoe]

11. Raygun, Bush I & Bush II

Raygun is an easy choice. The right wing adores him even though he was horrible for the economy, sold drugs to fund an illegal war, and put in motion the "Christian" right political machine which is ripping this country apart.

Bush I and Bush II are also easy. Bush I looks so good when compared to his idiot son that it's easy for non-thinkers to believe he was somehow worthwhile. Bush II is overrated by anyone who considers him to be a member of homo sapiens sapiens and lots of people seem to believe that he is a member of that group.

[Blackhatjack]

58. Diff order: George, Raygun, and Poppa Bush

For sheer lack of intelligence, skills, and ineptness, George is a runaway favorite.
I'm convinced Ronald Reagan was not really sure of what was going on. Even so the economic wheels came off the country's wagon while he was in the oval office, and he set the stage for corporate control of government and deregulation which we are still struggling with today.
Poppa Bush as lightyears better than George, and yet he stumbled through his term --blew a huge favorability rating after the Gulf War I and managed to be defeated for reelection.

[Not Me]

17. Reagan.

The greatest empty suit in history.

[FormerDittoHead]

21. Can't give much credit to a guy who didn't know what was going on...

(Reagan) Remember that Saturday Night skit where he acted like an idiot in front of the cameras, but in the board room was the sharpest knife in the drawer? THAT was funny!

[Dulcinea]

63. No contest.

Reagan. What was so great about him? I don't get it.

As far as I'm concerned, he was the guy who cut student loans during the '80s. But I guess I can thank him for making me more politically aware; I paid little attention to politics before that happened.

[Karenca]

2. I'll vote for *ush--------

Even if only ONE person thinks he's doing a fine job.

The fact that over 30% are in favor of this dictator
definitely makes him the most over-rated.

[iamahaingttta]

3. George Bush

Both of them.

[OnionPatch]

4. Ronald Reagan

The Republicans had just perfected their smoke and mirrors technique of propping up bad politicians and they made Ronnie into an icon that he certainly doesn't deserve. In fact, I think he did more harm than any other modern president.

[terrya]

5. I voted for JFK also

Looking back today, I see a President who got us more involved in Vietnam, who dragged his feet on civil rights, who engineered a coup against Diem. Sorry, looking at record today, beyond his youth and his looks and that "Camelot" crap, I really don't see anything to brag about with his Presidency.

[WinkyDink]

24. The U.S. was just 15 years past WWII.

It wasn't a hot-bed of All-American fervor for Civil Rights that JFK was elected into. He did the right thing (President John F. Kennedy submitted a civil rights bill to the U.S. Congress in June 1963 http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/08/0828_030828_martinlutherking.html)and the African-American community en masse henceforth became a mainstay of the Democratic Party.

It was JFK's Atty. General who stood in the school-house door, defying Gov. Wallace.

The "coup against Diem":
President Kennedy did not personally consent to the coup that ousted Ngo Dinh Diem; U.S. Ambassador to South Vietnam Henry Cabot Lodge instigated the coup without notifying Kennedy and in direct violation of Presidential orders. A few days before the coup was to commence, according to previously untapped documents and presidential audio recordings, Kennedy learned that Lodge was encouraging the conspirators behind his back and he sent messages of protestation to Lodge but did not take decisive action to reign him in, primarily because Lodge was a leading candidate for the Republican Presidential nomination in the 1964 election. Lodge’s incitement of the coup that overthrew Diem in November 1963 was by far the worst American mistake of the Vietnam War.
http://hnn.us/roundup/comments/30490.html

"more involved in VietNam":
JFK's having been killed in 1963, I'd say the "more involved" lies with "Tonkin Gulf" LBJ and Nixon, for the Conflict lasted until April 30, 1975.

[jonnyblitz]

28. my sentiments EXACTLY.

I could have written your post. :thumbsup:

[1932]

29. Anyoen who thinks JFK is overrated should read this book:

John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
by Richard Parker http://www.amazon.com/John-Kenneth-Galbraith-Politics-Economics/dp/0374281688/sr=8-1/qid=1161179596/ref=sr_1_1/104-7535414-8059139?ie=UTF8&s=books

so that they can get their facts straight.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0374281688.01._BO2,204,203,200_PIsitb-dp-500-arrow,TopRight,45,-64_AA240_SH20_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

[northzax]

32. psst- Don't forget the Bay of Pigs

that's a good one!

[WinkyDink]

77. From the Eisenhower Administration and the Dulles Bros.

[Marr]

56. I agree with you.

Though Reagan is on par with him these days, after the last 15 years of ridiculous pro-Reagan PR campaigns.

[bobbie]

76. It would help you to know the facts--JFK was pulling us out of Vietnam

JFK's plans to get us out of Vietnam were detailed in his national security memorandum #263, signed on Oct. 11, 1963. And he spoke publically about it.


Here are details:

"NSAM 263, signed on Oct. 11, 1963, recommended that:

"A program be established to train Vietnamese so that essential functions now
performed by U.S. military personnel can be carried out by Vietnamese by the end
of 1965. It should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel by that
time.

"In accordance with the program to train progressively Vietnamese to take over
military functions, the Defense Department should announce in the very near
future presently prepared plans to withdraw 1000 U.S. military personnel by the
end of 1963. This action should be explained in low key as an initial step in a
long-term program to replace U.S. personnel with trained Vietnamese without
impairment of the war effort" (Pentagon Papers, NY: Bantam, 1971, pp. 211-212).

The withdrawal policy was confirmed at a news conference on Oct. 31, where
Kennedy said in response to a reporter's question if there was "any speedup in
the withdrawal from Vietnam":

"I think the first unit or first contingent would be 250 men who are not
involved in what might be called front-line operations. It would be our hope to
lessen the number of Americans there by 1000, as the training intensifies and is
carried on in South Vietnam"
http://eserver.org/govt/gulf-war/jfk-lbj-and-vietnam.tx...

However, due to the coup that took JFK's life (likely because of his Vietnam policy and rift with the CIA over Cuba), LBJ seized power and expanded the war via the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that was based on a lie.

[Cameron27]

79. Thanks bobbie

:)

[bobbie]

86. My pleasure seasonedblue

President Kennedy isn't here to set his record straight, but we can do it.

[Philosoraptor]

6. ronnie

[WinkyDink]

7. Reagan.

Bar none.

[Joe_VB]

8. Yep...gotta go with St. Ronnie

[blondeatlast]

9. Jesus W. Bush and Ronnie Christ.

Ronnie got the ball to Hell rolling, George will ehlp us inside the gates.

[never_get_over_it]

10. No question

Reagan

[niallmac]

12. JFK as over-rated

Since he represented the last time I felt as much enthusiasm about my country and its
future I have to give his ability to inspire a nation greater credit than most.
Is Bush the most reviled? If so it is because just like St. Ronnie he lead a nation
with fear and hatred and look what he has accomplished to our horror.

[bobbie]

88. I'm confused, are you saying JFK is overrated or deserves his good rep?

...

[ProfessorGAC]

13. Reagan, By A Mile

I think you're underrating JFK. His performance during the Cuban Crisis was quite good, and his pursuit of the space program changed all of American society. It also put us on a footing of exploration over defense development, although obviously, they ended up hand-in-hand.

Reagan, on the other hand, did nothing. Despite all the rhetoric, he accomplished nothing except to damage the economy to the point that it took 12 years to recover.
The Professor

[calico1]

14. Reagan.

Mediocre at best. The Republicans pathetically try to compare him to FDR.:eyes:

[acmejack]

15. Reagan

JFK earned his reputation in one instant, otherwise we would have been vaporized over Cuba. It allows mew to forgive him for all the crap over the Bay of Pigs and all the rest. Don't forget he had to contend with the machinations of Dulles, Lodge, and all those creeps.

[madokie]

16. ronnie ray-gun the holey one

[leesa]

18. Raygun.

[Kashka-Kat]

19. Resident Bush

Waaay underqualified to even be considered president material.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

20. JFK.

Most under-rated, Clinton.

[bobbie]

87. Would you like to share your reasons for saying JFK is overrated?

I'm curious.

[moondust]

22. "Cut and Run" Reagan.

Can't even think of a close second.

[marylanddem]

23. RayGun hands down

[Neshanic]

25. Now incredibly overrated. Carter.

[proud2BlibKansan]

27. Oh no

He brought peace to the ME. Carter wasn't the best prez but he is far from most over-rated.

[Greyhound]

55. You seriously believe that Carter, the most maligned President of

our lifetime, is more over-rated than raygun? I just can't see how you get there.

[davekriss]

26. George W Bush

I know, I know; he's already at the bottom. But even there this swamp maggot is highly over-rated.

[Catherine Vincent]

61. ROTFL!

Thanks for the laugh. :hi:

[ThomWV]

30. Reagan, maybe Eisenhower

Gotta remember, all Ike did was let the Korean war start and play golf.

[enigma000]

62. The Korean War ended 6 months into the Eisenhower Presidency n/t

[Arkham House]

31. Wilson

No President--not even Bush--could match Woodrow's record of failure and mental derangement...he was the closest thing to a dictator we've ever had in the White House. From 1917-21, the Constitution of the United States essentially ceased to exist, on a scale the Busheviks can't begin to touch... Oh--and he was a hard-core racist, too, and acted on his racism...

[lastliberalintexas]

39. But most people don't consider Wilson "great"

How can he be overrated when he is seen for what he was, a mediocre manager with a grand idea/theory (League of Nations) but lacking the skills to implement it? Wilson is probably widely viewed where he should be, in the middle of the pack or the 3rd quartile. I just don't see how that means he's overrated, particularly when you have many people who think that Reagan was the Second Coming. :shrug:

[WI_DEM]

40. Actually Wilson is in most historians list of the great or near great

presidents.

[Selatius]

42. Those historians need to pull their heads out of their asses then

What's he great for? Getting involved in a European land war that gave birth to a century of warfare?

[WI_DEM]

45. I'm not arguing that he is, I'm just stating where the rankings lie

[lastliberalintexas]

44. I thought over the last 10-15 years hostorians had revised

his ranking downward? I do remember many years ago him being viewed as one of our best, but in later years I thought that his racism in particular had pulled him down. And I was talking about just ordinary folks, not experts. I do believe that most historians place Reagan much lower than the average American does too.

Either way, I'd still not even try to argue that he is more overrated than Reagan, no matter the standard used. :)

[WI_DEM]

46. I also think Wilson is too highly ranked

his second term in particular was a disaster.

but according to most recent poll of scholars he is ranked #6

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_rankings_of_U.S._Presidents

[saltpoint]

33. Reagan, by a country mile.

A clueless nitwit at best.

[Xenotime]

34. Ragun

[HughBeaumont]

35. Reagan was the middle class coffin. Bush 43 was the nails.

[hedgehog]

36. Woodrow Wilson

He ran on keeping us out of the war while secretly laying plans to mobilize every man, woman and child in the country. What he did to the Constitution makes Bush's attempts look trivial. He also turned back Civil Rights another 50 years by making it difficult or impossible for African Americans to get civil service jobs.

[leftofthedial]

37. raygun

but he's only idolized by neocon repuke idiots and ideologues

among the general public, Lincoln is the most overrated.

[TygrBright]

38. NO question. St. Ronnie. n/t

[MrSlayer]

41. Reagan was horrible yet treated like a god.

Has to be most overrated. I think JFK's potential is what people go by more so than his actual accomplishments.

[focusfan]

54. JFK really wasn`t given a chance

[MrSlayer]

67. Yes, thus my point.

Kennedy may very well have been one of the greatest ever but he also may have been one of the worst, we'll never know.

[devilgrrl]

43. Ronald Fucking Reagan

:puke:

[EFerrari]

48. Yeah, him. Let me join you.

:puke:

[Lydia Leftcoast]

47. Ronald Reagan, definitely

Republicans absolutely worship him, and even some non-Republicans seem mysteriously reverential toward him.

[CBHagman]

49. Reagan.

To listen to the media and the GOP, you'd think the old phoney could heal the sick and raise the dead. :eyes: They moved heaven and Earth to get National Airport named after the old sinner and then took about $400,000 in the Metro system to pay for NEW SIGNS -- this in a subway system with no dedicated source of funding, with passengers who assume a large percentage of the expenditures, with serious mechanical problems (e.g., broken escalators). :grr:

I never call it anything but National Airport.

[Raine]

50. Raygun nt

[caledesi]

51. Reagan, hand down! nt

[Greyhound]

52. Raygun by a mile. No question about it.

[Zomby Woof]

53. Indisputably, Reagan is the Most Overrated President

Once he fades from the memories of the living, the way his own memories faded hourly, he will be lowered significantly in estimation. Unless all of the books, newspapers, and videotapes with evidence of his massive and perpetual failures are destroyed one day, when Winston assigns them to the Memory Hole. Truly, he was a horrible brain-dead embarrassment in an empty suit. He embodied that spirit of Pride In Ignorance that is so very American. He was a wretchedly deceitful, deluded piece of shit, and it is my fondest wish that for eternity - if such a thing exists - that his rotting naked corpse will be forced to sleep over a freezing metal sidewalk grate in subzero temperatures, with nothing but a large brick of inedible cheese to gnaw on. Oh, and it would help if all of the homeless people he killed got to line up daily to pee on him. Fuck Ronald Reagan, and fuck his mindless cult of worshippers.

[ComerPerro]

57. RayGun

[Catherine Vincent]

59. President William Jefferson Clinton!

He's so over-rated that they are still rating him six years after he left office! :evilgrin:

[LSK]

60. Reagan

[peabody71]

64. GEORGE W. BUSH!!

HE deserves no support from anyone. period.

[Odin2005]

65. 1. Reagan: HE WON TEH COLD WAR! (not!)

2. JFK: all talk and charisma, little substance

3. Clinton: He had nothing to do with the 90's boom, He was a DLC corporate whore who support Welfare Deform and NAFTA.

4. Wilson: His arrogance and naive idealism caused an isolationist backlash. He brutally supressed Labor interests during WW1. He was also a racist and was against women's sufferage.

[Libby2]

66. Raygun n/t

[WCGreen]

68. Willard Fillmore....

[Vidar]

69. Reagan. Neither Bush is highly rated.

[AlCzervik]

70. St. Ronnie for sure.

[Zynx]

71. Teddy Roosevelt. He wasn't anywhere near the reformer he is given credit

for being.

[Raksha]

72. St. Ronnie. n/t

[RamboLiberal]

73. Reagan easily and I disagree with you on JFK

Imagine if we had Dumbya, Darth Vader Cheney, Rummy, Rice in the WH in Oct 1962. Several cities in the U.S. would've seen "the smoking gun in the shape of a mushroom cloud" and we'd have been in a nuclear WWIII.

I probably personally would've been a smoking corpse.

[bluedogyellowdog]

74. Reagan pile on is tempting

since he *is* so overrated. But here are a few appetizers:

Bush 41. Without a doubt one of the most willfully evil people to ever infest the White House next to his son, disguised as a mild mannered preppy. This was the guy responsible for first covering up for his CIA buddy Noriega and then going completely overkill in the other direction and invading Panama once Noriega became too much of an embarassment; fomented Iraq War I; set off the drastic expansion of prisons, lock-em-up tough on crime mentality and the drug war; and practically invented the style of modern defamatory campaigning that the Repugs use today with his vile Willie Horton ads and using "liberal" as an epithet. He and his entire administration were neck-deep in Iran-Contra, international drug smuggling, and numerous other scandals. Will go down in history as one of the most corrupt U.S. administrations ever. There's a good reason why they're called the Bush Crime Family. Like father, like son.

Abraham Lincoln. A white supremacist ideologue who proclaimed that ending slavery was not one of his goals and that equality for the races was an "absurd" idea. He is widely credited today with ending slavery - but ending slavery was not his intention, the Emancipation Proclamation was an afterthought with the sole purpose of weakening the south in the Civil War. Bush 43 isn't the first president to attack inalienable rights like Habeus Corpus and amass power in the executive branch in the name of winning a "war on *". That distinction belongs to Lincoln.

Eisenhower. The dirty little secret is this guy who warned against the "military industrial complex" in his last speech presided over the largest growth in the military industrial complex up to that point in U.S. history. Arthur Schlesinger wrote a book, "Cycles of American History" where he does a good dismantling of the myth that Truman ushered in the permanent war-based economy. It wasn't Truman, it was Eisenhower. Truman dismantled the war-based economy after WWII, Eisenhower reinstated it and gave it its largest and fastest period of growth until Raygun came into office.

Herbert Hoover. Deserves listing here since there's a move about to reclaim his reputation, and even cast him as some kind of "progressive Republican". Hello! This was the guy whose tepid response to the 1929 stock market crash and the Depression pushed the country deeper and deeper into economic hardship. The very definition of a do-nothing president. A rich anti-union creep who rode around in a limo and played golf while the country starved. Compare to the response to Katrina today from Bush. Eerily similar.

Tricky Dick Nixon. Yet another Repug who some are trying to reclaim the reputation of. A paranoid, criminal thug whose crimes don't need to be rehashed.

Bush 43. We still have morons driving around with "W: The President" stickers on their vehicles so, yes, he's overrated. The fact that there's *anyone* in this country who still defends or admires this asshole speaks volumes. And they ain't good volumes, folks.

And finally...

Ronnie Raygun. Weeeelll...Nancy and I were walking in the park watching the sunshine and thinking...weelll...it's Morning in America. And, weellll, suddenly I had this thought. Let's nuke Russia. So, weeelll, today I have signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes...and...er...wait, somebody fix the teleprompter...zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[LWolf]

75. Bill Clinton.

I didn't count those overrated by conservatives.

[Alexander]

78. Abe Lincoln - all you JFK bashers need to get your facts straight.

We would not be alive to have this discussion if JFK hadn't resisted the very popular urge to invade Cuba during the Missile Crisis.

That unwillingness to invade single-handedly saved the world. That alone makes JFK one of the greatest presidents.

Plus, he fired Allen Dulles, publicly stated he wished for the CIA to be broken "into a thousand pieces" and attempted to withdraw from Vietnam before his head got blown off.

Notes on Lincoln: He was a terrible racist and had zero interest in freeing slaves until he realized he had to.

[Cameron27]

80. Reagan

didn't like his first lady much either,

[two gun sid]

81. Ronnie Reagan.

[ecstatic]

82. George Washington

He had slaves!

[ikojo]

83. RAY-GUN and I agree with the OP

JFK...I think JFK is romanticized because he died in office at a young age.

[kestrel91316]

84. GWB. Nobody else is even close.

Though Saint Ronnie was also terribly overrated.............

[judy from nj]

85. Reagan

No one else is even close.

[JoMama49]

89. DEFINITELY REGAN!! He's like a hero to the right wing ....

and for what? He was asleep most of the time, and when not asleep, babbling almost as badly as * -- but of course he was the father figure the righties need, so he was somehow a great president???!! Clinton spent almost 8 years cleaning up the mess from his Reganomics. Of course now * has surpassed anything Raygun even thought of in his fondest dreams! He was a puppet, just like * -- much better actor and speaker tho.