Currently on Facebook, there is a poll circulating, asking for opinions on who the worst president of the past 30 years was. Obama was left off the list, to the dismay of many. Here's the results as of right now:
Carter - 35.9%
Reagan - 2.5%
Bush I - 1.8%
Clinton - 13%
Bush II - 46.9%
In case you care, here's my ranking, from best to worst:
Carter - He had plenty of black marks against his regime. The handling of the Shah of Iran is probably what people will remember him for. What most people won't remember is the huge amount of humanitarian work he has done since he left office. Carter's work with Habitat for Humanity alone is enough to earn him a gold star. The fact that he has devoted the last 20 years of his life to negotiating peace agreements in the Middle East (and occasionally daring to blame Israel) earns him a diamond star.
Clinton - Most people seem to get pissed about his infidelities, which somehow shamed the office of the president. I prefer to think that he helped us realize that politicians are men first and public servants second (if at all). Clinton's black marks come from his hyper-criminalization of marijuana, which combined with 3-strikes put a lot of harmless morons in prison with mandatory sentences. Oh, and there was a lot of shady circumstances surrounding the timing of US involvement in the Balkans. On the plus side, he got young people interested in politics, and tried to undo a lot of the Reagan damage. Clinton continues to campaign for energy policy reform and environmental issues to this day.
Bush I - Papa Bush was mostly harmless. I can barely picture him without hearing a Dana Carvey impression in my head. In retrospect, it seems that most of his presidency was spent cleaning up the messes he made as head of the CIA. He liked to take credit for destroying communism, but we all know that communism started destroying itself in 1942, and the fall of the Berlin wall during Bush I's presidency was just a coincidence. History will most likely remember him as the president who didn't close the deal in Iraq, but it turns out he might have just been calling a bluff. Bush I's primary crime against humanity was the birth of his sons, who are competing to see which one is the biggest fuckup. Since leaving office (after being soundly spanked by Clinton and GenX voters), he has turned into one of those international money playboys, selling all kinds of shit to the wrong people.
Reagan - forget about how he gutted natural resources protection, gutted anti-trust, gutted environmental protection, and widened the income gap with his bare hands. To really get a sense of Reagan's presidency, just make a list of countries he invaded or infiltrated because they weren't American enough. Grenada, Panama, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Columbia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Lebanon - I'm sure there's more that we don't even know about. In the middle of the war on drugs, he authorized the CIA to sell cocaine in order to fund anti-socialist guerillas. That's what we call a hawk, kids. Reagan is now dead, but he started his alzheimer's dimentia in 1986.
Bush II - STATE OF TOTAL WAR. With communism over, the gap had to be filled. He could have just said "We're going to turn the Middle East into Texas2, complete with grinding poverty and white aristocracy", but he didn't have the balls. Instead, he branded all Muslims as terrorists, and declared war on the anti-American thoughts they had. He was so busy being a war president that he didn't have time to make a constitutional amendment about gay marriage or turn social security over to corporate investors (like Enron did with its pension funds). I heard some folks talking the other day about how 9/11 should be a national holiday. It makes sense if you think about it as a tragic and unprecedented loss of life. But I'd rather not have a day devoted to remembering how Bush II subverted our national tragedy into the the most disgusting perversion of foreign policy in recent memory. Shame on you.
Where would I put Obama in that list? I wouldn't. We don't know what his presidency will be like. If he died tomorrow, I guess I would put him between Clinton and Bush I - a nobody who didn't fix anything, but didn't ruin anything either.
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