I think it is high time to adopt a Constitutional amendment prohibiting Republicans from serving in the future as Presidents of the United States. This is necessary because no Republican President since Dwight Eisenhower has produced a single policy initiative that has improved the nation’s well-being, and given the tenor of the language currently emanating for what passes as the leadership of the Republican Party, we can only expect worse for the future.
Eisenhower, of course, initiated the interstate highway system, perhaps the most important infrastructure innovation of the twentieth century in the United States. He also warned, as only the man who supervised the Normandy invasion could, against the emerging power of the military-industrial complex, which he might more accurately have termed the military-political complex. Little did he know that the military-industrial complex would, not quite fifty years after he left office, pale in comparison in terms of its baleful influence on federal policy to the agribusiness-political or the banking-political or the pharmaceutical-political complexes.
After Eisenhower came two Democrats, Kennedy and Johnson. Of Kennedy, I always say that the best thing that ever happened to his reputation as President was his assassination. No one may speak ill of a fallen hero. But he did have the good sense to put Lyndon Johnson in line to become President, and Johnson applied his famous, matchless political skills to enacting vast numbers of statutes that provided the infrastructure for what social safety net this nation has, in addition to enacting major civil rights legislation that, while it has not entirely solved our nation’s founding difficulties of race, has transformed us entirely to the good.
Next came Richard Nixon, about whom the less said, the better, except that he was the first in an increasingly long line of Republican Presidents who harbored imperial ambitions and hoped to expand the power of the presidency beyond its rightful bounds. We are unlikely to see the degree of paranoia and megalomania that Nixon brought to the presidency ever again, but his pathology was so extreme that it leaves ample room for bad policy even among subsequent Republican Presidents who are far less mentally ill.
Then there’s Jimmy Carter, who is busy proving that one can redeem a mediocre presidency through heaps and heaps of meritorious service after leaving the office. And Carter did achieve some important policy victories. Although his comprehensive energy legislation went down in flames, still bits and pieces of it passed. He anticipated his "conservative" successor by repealing various patently counter-productive regulations and strove to make the establishment of justice the centerpiece of his foreign policy.
Ronald Reagan stands to this day as the model that most Republicans aspire to, and he was a damn sight better than either of his Republican successors, although he was not actually a great President. He saddled the nation with enormous budget deficits stemming from what has become the defining bad habit of Republican presidents: a willingness to win votes with the easy promise of tax cuts even as one lacks the political fortitude to propose concomitant spending cuts, a practice subsequently perfected by his even more irresponsible successor, George W. Bush.
Speaking of Bushes, we need not spend much time on George H.W. Bush, the most forgettable President since James Garfield (who? My point).
Then the penultimate Democrat, immediate partisan predecessor to our illustrious incumbent: Bill Clinton, who presided over the consolidation of the alleged conservative "revolution" that Reagan started in 1980, what with welfare "reform," and set up the recent banking disaster by signing legislation repealing the eminently reasonable Glass-Steagall Act. But when he left office, the federal budget was in SURPLUS. Remember that? Where it would still be but for the grossly irresponsible tax cuts of his successor, George W. Bush, arguably the worst President since Andrew Jackson, perhaps the single most irresponsible President of all time. One could make a case for his first tax cut on good Keynesian grounds – the economy was in a mild recession at the time. The second tax cut, however, came after he had started his own personal war with Iraq, a deed that continues to bear ill fruit for our nation.
So it is that, from the present perspective, we have no hope of effective, competent leadership from any Republican president, so why not save ourselves the trouble by prohibiting their election in the future?