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-- C-SPAN ranks US Presidents

C-SPAN ranks US Presidents

http://www.c-span.org/PresidentialS...hip-survey.aspx

Wait a sec, how can the past presidents move up and down the rankings from this time 10 years ago?!

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Originally posted by George Smiley Wait a sec, how can the past presidents move up and down the rankings from this time 10 years ago?!

different historians participated in the ratings.

obviously, though, everyone under bush necessarily had to move down one slot if the order at the bottom remained static.

Why is Reagan 10th? He ballooned the government deficit, participated in illegal arms smuggling, intervened in numerous 3rd world internal conflicts, and turned the Republican party into a party of hypocrites...since they preach small government but spend like there's no tomorrow. To bad there isn't a viable third party out there.

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Originally posted by Krypton Why is Reagan 10th? He ballooned the government deficit, participated in illegal arms smuggling, intervened in numerous 3rd world internal conflicts, and turned the Republican party into a party of hypocrites...since they preach small government but spend like there's no tomorrow. To bad there isn't a viable third party out there.

And why is Kennedy so high? For a guy that made a couple memorable speeches, got us into Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, slept with Marilyn Monroe and then got shot, I'm not sure what he did to get placed there.

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Originally posted by Krypton Why is Reagan 10th? He ballooned the government deficit, participated in illegal arms smuggling, intervened in numerous 3rd world internal conflicts, and turned the Republican party into a party of hypocrites...since they preach small government but spend like there's no tomorrow. To bad there isn't a viable third party out there.

OMG what are you talking about? Republicans are the party of "fiscal conservatives" so they don't want to spend any money! Except billions of dollars toward the war in Iraq, privatized social security, bans on abortion, stem cell research, and the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Perfectly fine in my eyes! Why would you want to invest in alternative energy or science? Those silly "tax and spend liberals" will do anything to spend our hard earned dollars!

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Originally posted by NeoPhono And why is Kennedy so high? For a guy that made a couple memorable speeches, got us into Vietnam, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, slept with Marilyn Monroe and then got shot, I'm not sure what he did to get placed there.

It's probably because this "survey" isn't even truly about who is really the best president. It's about who gives them a warm and fuzzy feeling inside...

The Presidents were rated on "ten attributes of leadership" and then the scores added up. So its not a direct representation of who was the best but who had the highest score. The link breaks it all down

quote:

Originally posted by Krypton Why is Reagan 10th? He ballooned the government deficit, participated in illegal arms smuggling, intervened in numerous 3rd world internal conflicts, and turned the Republican party into a party of hypocrites...since they preach small government but spend like there's no tomorrow. To bad there isn't a viable third party out there.

... created 20 million jobs, brought down communism in a peaceful end to the Cold War, turned Jimmy Carter's 70% tax rates into 28%, drastically lowered inflation and the unemployment rate taking us out of a major economic downturn, had 52 hostages released from Iran the day he was signed into office after 444 days of Carter's worthless dialogue appeasement methods failed, ended the price controls on domestic oil which had contributed to energy crises in the 1970's, repealed the Windfall profit tax in 1988 which had previously increased dependence on foreign oil.... Jesus man, he had some blunders but he wasn't the devil.

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Originally posted by The17sss ... created 20 million jobs,

from 80-90 the US experienced a 22M increase in population. His presidency also began in a severe recession in which the unemployment rate was >10%. Business naturally goes through cycles. He was fortunate enough to be on the upswing. Job creation during his presidency was less a result of reagan policies and more a result of population growth and the natural business cycle.

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Originally posted by The17sss brought down communism in a peaceful end to the Cold War,

who cares. i hate when republicans cite this. social forces bigger than reagan were at play.

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Originally posted by The17sss turned Jimmy Carter's 70% tax rates into 28%,

1) he was also the first president since the end of WW2 that increased the national debt over his presidency.

2) he also decreased the amount of income needed to fall within the highest bracket from over 212K to about 30K (also, highest marginal rate of 70% doesn't mean people were paying anywhere near 70% - more likely 40% or something like that).

EDIT: BTW - 212K in 1980 is about the same as 550K today. that's a pretty high marginal bracket.

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Originally posted by The17sss drastically lowered inflation and the unemployment rate taking us out of a major economic downturn,

that was the independent actions of Paul volker, the fed chairman during the 1980s, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979. (NJ native!!!) Reagan had nothing to do with ending the stagflation problem.

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Originally posted by The17sss had 52 hostages released from Iran the day he was signed into office after 444 days of Carter's worthless dialogue appeasement methods failed, ended the price controls on domestic oil which had contributed to energy crises in the 1970's, repealed the Windfall profit tax in 1988 which had previously increased dependence on foreign oil.... Jesus man, he had some blunders but he wasn't the devil.

i'm not commenting on the rest because i'm not well informed about those issues.


EDIT: on a side note, i was searching the historic highest marginal rates and the lowest high marginal rate from 36-80 was 70%. With that in mind, it's funny that republicans say that raising the highest rate from 35 to 38 will ruin the US economy. However, they always cite the good old days of america during the postwar period when america became so prosperous. ironic!

I found this indirectly, it has a survey of surveys for ranking Presidents.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histor..._survey_results

Pretty much, the top and bottom 10 don't change a lot whomever you tend to ask.

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Originally posted by jerZ07002 from 80-90 the US experienced a 22M increase in population. His presidency also began in a severe recession in which the unemployment rate was >10%. Business naturally goes through cycles. He was fortunate enough to be on the upswing. Job creation during his presidency was less a result of reagan policies and more a result of population growth and the natural business cycle.

Ah.. so, lowering the tax rate from 70% to 28% definitely didn't have a positive affect on the business climate. It was just the typical ebb and flow. Jimmy Carter was all about bad timing, and Regan good timing.

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who cares. i hate when republicans cite this. social forces bigger than reagan were at play.

Plenty of Poles, Ukranians, Czechs, Germans, Slovakians, Bulgarians, Romanians, etc. care... I would guess. Sure there were plenty of other social forces at play, but it's not just a coincidence that Regan was president when it happened... he in effect put things in play that caused their economy to crumble within itself.

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1) he was also the first president since the end of WW2 that increased the national debt over his presidency.

Yes... which he lamented after leaving office was his biggest regret and failure as a president. At least the man didn't try to pass the buck.

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that was the independent actions of Paul volker, the fed chairman during the 1980s, appointed by Jimmy Carter in 1979. (NJ native!!!) Reagan had nothing to do with ending the stagflation problem.

I'm not an economist, but I find it hard to believe that Regan's policies seriously had nothing to do with the economy getting back on track. That's a crazy statement.


But my point is really that there's no reason to villfiy him like Krypton did, as if he is evil incarnate. That list put out by C-SPAN is a joke! Washington's presidency, and his voluntary retirement after two terms, saved America from the establishment of a new royalty. FDR, comes in at number 3 while being the only American President to refuse to follow Washington's precedent, and Congress eventually had to place explicit term limits on the office after FDR's president-for-life ambitions.

Andrew Malcom sums up the rest nicely:

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Kennedy doesn't belong on the top ten, either. Kennedy was definitely an inspirational figure in American politics, but his presidency was a mess. He fumbled the Cold War badly enough to prompt the USSR to build the Berlin Wall, and nearly started a nuclear war over Cuba with his fecklessness. He jumped into the Vietnam War when France withdrew, and meddled significantly with Vietnam's government to exacerbate the crisis. His successor LBJ comes in at #11 despite making the situation even worse. Reagan ended the Cold War in victory and restored American economic health, and yet trails JFK by four positions. I find it terribly ironic that Harry Truman gets ranked as #5 now. I don't have a big issue with that ranking, but when he left office, he was less popular than George W Bush, who comes in at #36 in this survey. But was Truman more important than Thomas Jefferson, who doubled the size of the nation with the Louisiana Purchase and set the stage for Manifest Destiny? I know JFK wasn't a better President than Jefferson, which alone makes this survey deeply suspect.

Basically, this list is top heavy with media favorites rather than a serious look at the accomplishments of each President.

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Originally posted by The17sss ... created 20 million jobs,

Natural business cycle.

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brought down communism in a peaceful end to the Cold War

Actually the Soviets brought themselves down.

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turned Jimmy Carter's 70% tax rates into 28%

That's without all the very generous exemptions and credits available to a top bracket income earner.

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drastically lowered inflation and the unemployment rate taking us out of a major economic downturn

The Federal Reserve lowered inflation. The president does not control the money supply.

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had 52 hostages released from Iran the day he was signed into office after 444 days of Carter's worthless dialogue appeasement methods failed

The Iranians had a looming war with Iraq on their hands. They had much more pressing concerns than 52 American hostages, many of whom were part of the Shah's tyrannical support. The embassy deserved to be stormed.

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ended the price controls on domestic oil which had contributed to energy crises in the 1970's

Actually, Saudi Arabia embargoed as a protest against American support for Israel's illegal occupations.

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repealed the Windfall profit tax in 1988 which had previously increased dependence on foreign oil

The "Windfall Profit Tax" was actually not a profit tax at all. It was an excise tax, much like cigarette or alcohol taxes. Additionally, America had used up most of its proven oil reserves while demand continued to increase, and so it was inevitable America would be dependent on foreign suppliers.

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Jesus man, he had some blunders but he wasn't the devil.

I reaaaaaaally don't like what he did to Nicaragua.

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Originally posted by The17sss Ah.. so, lowering the tax rate from 70% to 28% definitely didn't have a positive affect on the business climate. It was just the typical ebb and flow. Jimmy Carter was all about bad timing, and Regan good timing.

that's not what im saying. i was stating that independent factors were a much larger contribution to creating 20m jobs.

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Originally posted by The17sss Plenty of Poles, Ukranians, Czechs, Germans, Slovakians, Bulgarians, Romanians, etc. care... I would guess. Sure there were plenty of other social forces at play, but it's not just a coincidence that Regan was president when it happened... he in effect put things in play that caused their economy to crumble within itself.

fair enough about the poles, but social factors were a much greater contribution. you think Reagan's hard line speeches really contributed that greatly to the demise of a union that was already faltering. you give too much credit to the man.

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Originally posted by The17sss Yes... which he lamented after leaving office was his biggest regret and failure as a president. At least the man didn't try to pass the buck.

how could he have achieved all of his other 'great successes' without increasing the deficit? after all, it was the deficit spending that was the cause of the economic recovery engineered almost solely by reagan, right?

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Originally posted by The17sss I'm not an economist, but I find it hard to believe that Regan's policies seriously had nothing to do with the economy getting back on track. That's a crazy statement.

tell me how reagan lowered inflation?

i was responding to your comment that he stopped inflation (which is false). i should have been more specific that i wasn't commenting on reducing unemployment

the inflationary spike in the 1970s and 1980s was stopped by drastic contraction of the money supply (i.e., Volker increasing interest rates), of which the president has ZERO control. Job creation followed the economic recovery, which was a result of both the eventual reduction in interest rates (which increased industrial output) and reagan's deficit spending.

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Originally posted by The17sss But my point is really that there's no reason to villfiy him like Krypton did, as if he is evil incarnate. That list put out by C-SPAN is a joke! Washington's presidency, and his voluntary retirement after two terms, saved America from the establishment of a new royalty. FDR, comes in at number 3 while being the only American President to refuse to follow Washington's precedent, and Congress eventually had to place explicit term limits on the office after FDR's president-for-life ambitions. Andrew Malcom sums up the rest nicely: Basically, this list is top heavy with media favorites rather than a serious look at the accomplishments of each President.

if you boil down the lasting effect of reagan's actual proven accomplishments, his presidency was pretty weak. for me, reagan's impact was a return to deficit spending. clearly, that tradition has been carried forward by every republican administration since his. that is far more harmful than any slight contribution he made to the end of the cold war. all those other 'achievements' you cited were either small accomplishments, or a result of good timing.

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Originally posted by The17sss Plenty of Poles, Ukranians, Czechs, Germans, Slovakians, Bulgarians, Romanians, etc. care... I would guess. Sure there were plenty of other social forces at play, but it's not just a coincidence that Regan was president when it happened... he in effect put things in play that caused their economy to crumble within itself.

Actually, I'm pretty sure most Eastern Europeans would rather attribute the end of the Cold War to things that actually did have an effect on ending it. Reagan himself said that nothing would change without someone on the Soviet end willing to reform... aka Gorbachev was more important than Reagan. And Condoleezza Rice's book (which I recommend if for no other reason than to understand how Iraq happened) attributed the fall of the Soviet Union entirely to glasnost and the nationalist movements in the Balkans and Caucasus that resulted - it shifted the goals of the USSR away from Western Europe and socialism and towards merely keeping the empire together (which ultimately failed).

I've never read a credible historian credit Reagan with anything more than hastening the fall of the Soviet Union by more than a day or two.

The former US ambassador to the Soviet Union, George Kennan, father of the theory of "containment," wrote that "the suggestion that any United States administration had the power to influence decisively the course of a tremendous domestic political upheaval in another great country on another side of the globe is simply childish." Furthermore, he wrote that Reagan's militant policy only served to undermine reformists like Gorbachev and strengthen hard-liners who would return to Stalin's more militant stance against the West. "Thus the general effect of Cold War extremism was to delay rather than hasten the great change that overtook the Soviet Union."

So, yeah. I don't know what grounds you're using to make your claim, but even (relative) conservative heavyweights like Condi and Kennan think that's a load of bollocks.

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Yes... which he lamented after leaving office was his biggest regret and failure as a president. At least the man didn't try to pass the buck.

When he could remember where he put the buck. Sorry, too easy.

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I'm not an economist, but I find it hard to believe that Regan's policies seriously had nothing to do with the economy getting back on track. That's a crazy statement.

Yet a pretty common one.

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Reagan's theory was really "trickle down" economics borrowed from the Republican 1920s (Harding-Coolidge-Hoover) and renamed "supply side." Cut tax rates for the wealthy; everyone else will benefit. As Reagan's budget director David Stockman confided to me at the time, the supply-side rhetoric "was always a Trojan horse to bring down the top rate." Many middle-class and poor citizens figured it out, even if reporters did not. Reagan's great political accomplishment was ideological -- propelling the ascendancy of the right -- but the actual governing results always looked more like hoary old interest-group politics. Wealthy individuals, corporate and financial interests got extraordinary benefits (tax reductions and deregulation) while the bottom half got whacked whenever an opportunity arose. His original proposition -- cut taxes regressively, double military spending, shrink government and balance the federal budget -- looked cockeyed from the start. Yet when the logic self-destructed in practice, conservatives were remarkably content, since they had delivered the boodle to the right clients. After my notorious account of Reagan's economic failure, based on my conversations with Stockman, was published in the December 1981 Atlantic Monthly, the Gipper likened me to John Hinckley, the would-be assassin who shot him. So much for Mr. Nice Guy. Both parties would spend the next 20 years cleaning up after the Gipper's big mistake. They collaborated in an ongoing politics of bait and switch -- raising taxes massively on working people through the Social Security payroll tax while continuing to cut taxes for the more affluent and to whittle down government aid for anyone else. The Gipper had taught Washington an important new technique for governing -- how to fog regressive tax cuts past the general public without arousing voter retribution (the media can be counted on to assist). The trickery continues to succeed. Pre-Reagan politics used to address various economic inequities. The great injustice confronted by George W. Bush was the estate tax on millionaires. Reagan's stubborn optimism did refresh the national spirit, no question, and it certainly powered his political successes. He gave us a television-era remake of Warren Harding's "return to normalcy." But in hindsight, I have come to think that the illusions fostered by his sunny messages perhaps did the gravest economic damage. Things were not normal; they were deteriorating and leading toward a chasm of growing inequalities. The rending of the American middle class, the stagnation of industrial wages, the relentless loss of U.S. manufacturing -- these great wounds to general prosperity were all visible during the Reagan era, but instead of addressing them honestly, his policies further aggravated the consequences.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opini..._greider13.html

I mean, hell, you're seriously going to argue that supply-side economics were a good thing? I would love to have you make that argument, because the experience around the world shows that supply-side economics only enriches the wealthy and devastates the poor. And I'm not just talking about the United States - Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan are responsible for increasing poverty all throughout the world through their contingency programs hoisted on the World Bank and IMF. Believe me, you know this is a debate I would love for you to attempt.

US poverty line - not the rise during Republican administrations:

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But my point is really that there's no reason to villfiy him like Krypton did, as if he is evil incarnate. That list put out by C-SPAN is a joke! Washington's presidency, and his voluntary retirement after two terms, saved America from the establishment of a new royalty. FDR, comes in at number 3 while being the only American President to refuse to follow Washington's precedent, and Congress eventually had to place explicit term limits on the office after FDR's president-for-life ambitions.

So he should be lower because he served an additional term? Great reasoning.

I'd also just like to point out that Reagan gets credit for ending the hostage crisis on Inauguration Day - why do you think the Iranians timed the release just so? Well, because Reagan had negotiated to unfreeze Iranian capital assets. That's right, the gipper negotiated with terrorists and kept that hidden from the public until after he left office in order to maintain the image of Carter as failure and Reagan as hero.

Furthermore, the later arms-for-hostages scandal only adds fuel to the fire that Reagan negotiated with Iranian terrorists in order to look good politically.

quote:

When the Lebanese newspaper "Al-Shiraa" printed an expos� on the clandestine activities in November 1986, Reagan went on television and vehemently denied that any such operation had occurred. He retracted the statement a week later, insisting that the sale of weapons had not been an arms-for-hostages deal. Despite the fact that Reagan defended the actions by virtue of their good intentions, his honesty was doubted. Polls showed that only 14 percent of Americans believed the president when he said he had not traded arms for hostages.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reagan...ts/pande08.html

So, feel free to believe the Gipper was a political God. I'm going to continue to believe he doesn't belong anywhere near a top ten list (and my view is predominately based on the mere fact that he crippled the development industry and de-legitimized international institutions to a point from which they still have not recovered).

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