I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this for a while, & thought it might stimulate some discussion.
Who have been the worst presidents since the beginning of the 20th Century?
1) George W Bush: entered office with the 1st surplus in decades, & within a year or 2 changed it to our worst deficits ever, & more than doubled the federal debt. He had 2 recessions, the 2nd being the worst since the Great Depression. The disparity between rich & poor became the greatest since the Great Depression. He ignored climate change at a critical time & was very pro fossil fuels & other large multinational corporations. He allowed 9/11 to happen despite ample warning; he got us into 2 intractable wars that cost us a lot of lives, capital & world status; & made an unstable region a lot more unstable. He instigated the Patriot Act, NSA spying & a general loss of personal freedom & subversion of our democracy into a fascist corporatocracy. Clearly the worst president ever.
2) Ronald Reagan: the most consequential president since FDR, but unfortunately in a negative way. Tripled our debt & started a long trend of irresponsible budgets consisting of large deficits due to low taxes on the rich. Very anti-environmental, anti-labor, pro-business & pro fossil fuel. Started the long trend toward corporate control of our government.
The next 3 are difficult to put in order, but I make an estimate:
3) Warren Harding: perhaps the most corrupt president ever.
4) Richard Nixon: unethical, involved in dirty tricks against any opponent or other person he considered his enemy.
5) Calvin Coolidge: champion of laissez-faire (which GW Bush later imitated). Under him, the US developed a huge wealth gap. His pro-business, anti-worker policies set us up for the Great Stock Market crash of 1929 & the ensuing Great Depression.
The next 4 are difficult to put in order, & I won't try. I'll just put them in chronological order:
William Howard Taft: reversed Theodore Roosevelt's progressive policies, helping out his big business cronies. Appalled TR so much, that the latter bolted the Republican Party to run against him in the next election. I understand he made a decent chief justice of the US Supreme Court though.
Herbert Clark Hoover: too little too late to avoid the Great Stock Market Crash & the Great Depression for which he popularly gets primary blame, though it should be more on the shoulders of the terrible policies of his 2 predecessors (Coolidge & Harding).
Gerald Ford: mostly inconsequential presidency, most noted for his pardon of Richard Nixon, setting a bad precedent.
George Herbert Walker Bush: a man without principle, involved in seemingly every part of the federal government over a nearly 4 decade period, building huge ties to both government & business, building his overall influence, & seemingly having a connection to almost every major negative event for about 4 decades. But his presidency wasn't that remarkable other than being more or less a continuation of deleterious Reagan policies that would more or less persist until today.
What do all 9 of these presidents have in common? They're all Republican corporatists. The 2 Republicans that escaped the bottom 9, TR & Eisenhower, were not especially conservative nor corporatist. In fact, TR was famous as a "trustbuster", progressive & conservationist, & I would rank him right after his cousin Franklin as the 2nd best president since 1900.
The remaining presidents (Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton & Barack Obama) I couldn't put in order. They all have a mixture of positive & negative points, but they're all clearly better than the 9 bottom & worse than the 2 top presidents I mentioned.
As for the candidates currently running for president, I see all the Republicans as disastrous, some worse than others with the potential of equaling or even beating out W for the worst ever. I see Hillary Clinton as basically a continuation of the centrist, corporatist policies of Obama & her husband, which is not enough to get us off our path of deterioration. I see Bernie Sanders as a transformative figure in the mold of FDR, advocating many of the same types of policies at a time very similar to the one that FDR found himself in, & our only hope of avoiding the following 4 impending catastrophes: economic & environmental collapse due to climate change & other disastrous trends regarding our natural resources & the environment; civil strife, possibly civil war, due to racism & classism & an enormous wealth disparity between rich & poor; economic collapse due to a huge, unmanageable debt & devaluation of currency; & complete subversion into a fascist corporatocracy & military state which is currently well under way.
I couldn't see how to add any more polls, but it would be fun to also ask:
Which was the best president since 1900? (Add Teddy Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson & Ford to the poll choices)
Which candidate would make the worst president?
Which candidate would make the best president?
Choices for the previous 2 questions, including nearly all of the major declared candidates of the 2 major parties, 1 rumored to be considering running, & a minor party candidate:
Hillary Clinton
Bernie Sanders
Martin O'Malley
Lincoln Chaffee
Jim Webb
Joe Biden
Donald Trump
Jeb Bush
Scott Walker
Marco Rubio
Ted Cruz
Rand Paul
Ben Carson
Mike Huckabee
Chris Christie
Rick Perry
John Kasich
Carly Fiorina
Bobby Jindal
Rick Santorum
Lindsey Graham
George Pataki
Jill Stein