This is the third part of a series on politics that is geared toward the 2014 elections. Here is the first part. Here is the second part.
A few days from now, Americans will vote in the 2014 congressional and gubernatorial elections. A majority of political experts expect Republicans to maintain their majority in the U.S. House of Representatives and attain a majority in the U.S. Senate, which currently has 55 Democrats, including two independents who usually vote with the Democrats, and 45 Republicans.
The political experts cite President Barack Obama’s unpopularity as a crucial factor in their prediction that Republicans will win the congressional election. The experts might be right — and voters might be justified in sending Obama a “message” that they find his job performance unsatisfactory.
Voters, however, are myopic to say the least in continuing to tell pollsters that they regard Obama as the worst president in American history, a sentiment that I have repeatedly heard and read in recent weeks.
I personally believe that Obama had an opportunity to be a historically great president because he was inaugurated in the midst of the USA’s greatest economic crisis since The Great Depression, the American public wanted bold action, and Obama had more allies in Congress than any president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. Yet, Obama and a Congress with a huge Democratic Party majority did nothing compared to what our nation’s leaders did in 1933.
Obama’s unwillingness in 2009 to rally the public and Congress behind a wide variety of initiatives that could have improved the lives of tens of millions of Americans was an extraordinary failure. Unfortunately, he hasn’t done much since either so I regard the Obama presidency as a failed presidency as of today for several reasons, many of his own doing.
The best political article I ever read explained Obama’s failures better than I ever could.
“When faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze,” wrote Emory (Ga.) University professor Drew Westen in this 2011 article in The New York Times. “Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it.”
Obama’s legacy is a negative one so far, but it’s absurd that 63 percent of Republicans surveyed by Quinnipiac University this summer rate Obama as the worst American president since World War II, a period that included 12 presidents. Republicans rate Jimmy Carter as the second worst president since 1945 with nearly three times as many “worst” votes as George W. Bush and Richard Nixon.
I’m not particularly comfortable with 54 percent of Democrats classifying the younger Bush as the worst president since World War II, but at least historians have, in fact, rated him very low. A 2010 survey of 238 presidential scholars rates Bush Jr. as the fifth worst president in American history behind only No. 1 loser Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren Harding, and Franklin Pierce. Obama ranks 15th best of our 43 presidents, but it should be pointed out that the survey came just a few months after the Affordable Care Act became law.
Americans’ ignorance about history might best be demonstrated by their high ranking of Ronald Reagan. Sixty-six percent of Republicans surveyed by Quinnipiac rate Reagan as the best president since World War II, but the 238 scholars interviewed by the Siena (N.Y.) College Research Institute rank Reagan 18th while post-World War II presidents Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Bill Clinton rank ninth, 10th, 11th, and 13th.
More alarmingly, Americans interviewed by Gallup have rated Reagan as the greatest president ever in 2001, 2005, and 2011. The 2011 survey showed Americans ignorance of history because they ranked modern-era presidents Reagan, Clinton, and Kennedy first, third and fourth with Obama and Bush Jr. seventh and 10th. Three favorites of historians — Theodore Roosevelt, Truman, and Thomas Jefferson — were eighth, ninth, and 11th.
“Americans clearly evaluate presidents through partisan lenses — with Democrats and Republicans each most likely to choose a greatest president within their own party,” wrote Frank Newport of Gallup, Inc.
Newport was being polite. Americans are partisan, but they’re also ignorant about history.
Coming Oct. 30: Complete lists of the best and worst presidents in American history.
|