Didn't W come into office at the beginning of a recession? And companies like Enron were prosecuted under his watch. Though the SEC decided to start watching porn after that it seems

Unlike W, Carter inherited most of his problems. I have him as third-worst.

I'm surprised that more people who lived through Nixon don't pick Nixon. During his Presidency there was, for a brief time, a very real possibility that our democratic system itself would break due to his actions.

You mean it was born in 1992 when Clinton ran a vicious class warfare campaign to get into office in the first place...

I was like 2 at the time, sorry.

I voted for Carter. Completely ineffectual.

Yup. It's funny that the Repubs get blamed for all that and that Clinton gets kudos for his economy, yet Enron et al were WHY Clinton had such a great economy. It was a giant stock-market based house of cards built on a foundation of complete fabrication of financial positions.

The recession started in 2001, though there were some knocks in 2000 and notable volatility in the stock market. See more here: http://www.usatoday.com/money/econom...4-04-fed_x.htm

The guys from Enron did get prosecuted, yes, but bear in mind that was only after Enron failed in what was then the biggest bankruptcy in history. So, if you need a smoking gun that big to actual bring scrutiny to bear on something....

DID ENRON fail, or were they allowed to prosper illegally.
W is the only P on the list to to endure a foreign attack on American soil during his Presidency on the list. That it cost money to fix that problem shouldnt be a shock.

But he is an affable easy scapegoat, so feel free.
Dont ask what Greenspan an Clinton laid to waste that he inherited, its too dirty.

Yes, it cost money, approx. $1.5 trillion. But the overall deficit rose by over $6 trillion on his watch. There is over $4.5 trillion in there not attributable to the response to 9/11.

That didn't start under Clinton. We've been running this voodoo economy for many decades.

Katrina. End of story.

We can argue all day about the real effect a President has on the economy, but the response to Katrina made us look like a third world country.

But it was just negroes down there so it doesn't count.

Neither and both, depending on your point of view.

Enron used creative accounting practices to produce a basically fictional account of their finances, drastically overstating their earnings. They then overextended their operations based on these fictional earnings until the entire house of cards fell in upon them.


What about the first bombing of the WTC?


We've probably spent over $1 trillion to "fix" the problem and guys can still board planes and try to blow them up with their underwear.

Plus, a significant portion of Bush's deficits come from his tax cuts and Medicare Part D, neither of which are directly related to terrorism.


Please do tell. Don't forget the part of the story where Republicans led by Phil Gramm also gut the entire regulatory structure for the financial industry.

Nope

Edit: Blast you flere!

Stop with your lies. Republicans are opposed to socialized medicine.

As for the Enron thing, I'm not sure how you can blame anyone in government. They basically just lied through their teeth and fudged numbers using complex accounting methods.

If you want to blame someone, blame the people who didn't question those numbers and bought stock in the company. There were a lot of red flags from the unprecedented growth to the fact they were trading at 55 times earnings. Sorry, while you can make a case that the SEC should have been on their ass more, people need to take some responsibility in the stocks they purchase.

That's fine, but let's not forget that Enron was simply yet another example of exactly how much the SEC has been out to lunch for the past two decades, if not longer.

they were watching porn

I wouldn't argue that they've been out to lunch and soft on Wall Street. But I think one of the problems is that if the people there were smart enough to figure out the stuff these companies were doing, they wouldn't be working for the SEC.

So you would have been like six then. I can see how you can judge him so much more easily.

Carter yelled at him when he was 4

Obama has an impressive percentage of the votes considering his short time in office to this point and some awfully tough competition. I wonder if he can pass Carter by the end of his first term.

Jimmy Carter.

This one was easy.

Obama has been president for how long, and he's already the worst president ever?

Really? This board never misses out on an opportunity to amaze me whenever I check in.

+1

Funny then that even now after two recessions the GDP is much higher than it was when Clinton came into office. There was a ton of real and lasting productivity growth in the nineties. Look at companies like Wal-Mart or Fed-Ex or any number of others and you'll see great leaps in productivity that still last.

You can say Clinton had nothing to do with that, but arguing that there was no real growth in the nineties is silly.

Well, by 8, but yeah I can remember lines at the gas pumps, etc. I was at least world aware then, and spent much of the next several years looking back on his policies and how much Reagan changed the country.

Sorry, I'll clarify. Clinton is lauded for fantastic economic growth in the 90s, where I'd argue much of it was a house of cards. That isn't to say there wasn't growth at all, but I think we really had a much more typical or average economy if you will, and he wouldn't be getting all these kudos if it weren't for all the faked numbers.

As pointed out elsewhere, I don't BLAME him for this, I just don't want to give him CREDIT for it either. The part that frustrated me was when ENRON went down, everyone turned to the "typical Republican support for business", ingoring the fact that the Bush administration was in office when they got taken down, and Clinton was in office when they did most of their damage.

And I think you're minimizing extraordinary economic growth even if you eliminate whatever it is that you consider part of the house of cards.

interesting. well, shit:

reagan
good: deregulation created a business boom and in the wake of the oil crisis.

bad: modern corporatism. everyone knew that deregulating the markets would eventually lead to monopolies.

his war on drugs set black communities back 50 years.

iran/contra is almost comical in it's modern day consequences.

i'd sum up his presidency by calling it 'burning bridges to the future'


clinton
good: he had a trillion dollar industry fall from the sky (internet). so, right place right time?

bad: he deregulated the markets further. looted social security and called it surplus. put the nail in the coffin of blue collar america with nafta.

and some other stuff.

w
the great unspoken fear in politics back in the 90's was that china would somehow lay claim to middle eastern oil.

like it or not bush did what he had to.

kissinger said history would be kind to him and i tend to agree. yes, it was bs and yes the 'war' is for oil. but without it our 'green' transition is a lot less gradual and a lot more road warriors.

I still don't think some of these boys on the left have seen you write this. :)

a.k.a. was a dumbass...

Honest question, but what good is more regulation when you have businessmen with reckless disregard for law and an incompetent government watchdog?

Really? The poll is worst president of your lifetime and people can't read well enough to understand the difference between your lifetime and ever? People never miss an opportunity to amaze me...

Because the federal govt has to enact one-size-fits-all laws, regulatory rules that are needed to curtail the big, bad boys end up squeezing out the smaller, good boys. And in noticeable cases (banks, cc), the sins of one brother negatively affect the the rest of the brothers (and their customers). It's always the law of unintended consequences that results, which is why one always has to be cautious and critical of federal govt. "reforms".

dola: I expect that he posted the same response int eh best president of your lifetime thread?

lololololol.... sorry, I guess not....

People who blame either President for what Enron did have a fundamental lack of knowledge of the situation. There is a really good book that covers the whole scandal and people would realize that no President had the power to stop what they were doing. There were too many things that came together to make it happen.

Bush doesn't get blame because he was in office during it. He gets blame because of his connections to the company. Enron was a large supporter of his and Bush allowed them to write the energy bill. I don't think he did anything wrong in regards to the Enron collapse, but he should have never let them write the energy policy of this country. It's just a massive conflict of interest and a political favor at the highest levels.

OK, first of all let's not forget that Enron went into bankruptcy primarily because people in the industry, and the financial press, started asking questions about their ridiculous results, which led to more scrutiny and thus less creative accounting, and once the creative accounting was gone, the house of cards fell and the SEC finally took action after the market had spoken and sent Enron towards bankruptcy.

Even at this point Enron executives were regular members of Dick Cheney's energy task force and high-level executives were very close to the White House.

Having said that, I don't think you can blame Enron on Bush or Clinton. It goes back to the culture of deregulation started under Reagan and aggressively pursued by Alan Greenspan and Congressional Republicans.

Then I think we agree. I just don't like seeing Clinton get credit for all the economic boom that was tied up in these kinds of practices (and similar things were done with many of the dot coms and other company booms of the time), that's all.

And most of the employment growth had nothing to do with those types of companies.

You make a lot of good points, but don't forget that it was Arthur Andersen that was asleep at the wheel. People I know who worked for AA said it was the day that AA went into consulting that sealed the fate of the company because the integrity needed on the auditing side got trumped by the profit margins demanded by the consulting side. Towards the end of its lifetime the consultants were calling all the shots at AA, and if I remember right the AA consultants came up with a lot of the shady schemes Enron used.

Carter, hands down. He was afraid to do anything. Don't need a pussy in the White House unless you are fucking it. Carter, he was like an abused dog that ran and hid when he heard loud noises.

A good point, and one I didn't mention mainly for the sake of brevity. Though I wouldn't term AA as "asleep at the wheel". I think the evidence (much of it now shredded, sadly) tended to show that they were a willing participant in some parts of the creative accounting.

Like sitting in a classroom reading children's books. Oh no wait...

While IMO, Obama is determined to make it on to this list, I still consider it too early to judge the effects of his decisions, and many opportunities for key decisions have not yet presented themselves.

Like Subby earlier, I think this comes down to W. or Carter.

I voted Carter because when the two presidents were actually faced with something that's the president's job (most of what these guys are being judged on is way outside the constitutional duties of the chief executive), Carter handled the Iran Hostage Crisis and Cold War Russia far worse than Bush handled 9/11. For that reason, I voted Jimmy.

Agree. Carter's term was flat out awful.


Look at how poorly he does in the historical stuff:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histori..._United_States

I actually agree that HW was a lot better than some might think.

Even today he's in the late 20's early 30s for his presidency by historians.


The major mover for this argument is Einenhower, who moved form the 20s to the top ten, after White House tapes were released and we saw all he did behind the scenes, such as keep us out of Vietnam because it would be a quagmire and we'd lose, even though his advisors were arguing for it. We also saw how much the interestates changed us, working to fight mcartyism behind the scenes, beginning and finishing and winning a war (Korea), creation of NASA, dealt with countless recessions and got us out, saw the admitenance of two states, dealt with the cold war, which was a band new thing, etc.

Lex Luthor, hands down.

James Buchanan did not create the problem of the South succession prior to teh electoin of 1860, or after it, and yet his complete lack of any action on his part makes him judged as one of our worst presidnets of all time. Who knows what might have happened had he done something?

Even his general said, prior to the election, that fedreal troops should be moved to hotspots in teh south in case Lincoln was elected, in orde rto stop seccesion, and he rejected this sagely advice.

Could we havce reduced the length or the number of people killed in the Civil War? What would have happened then?

If I were to answer this question based on the world today, I'd say Bush outdid Carter, who outdid Johnson (the president in office when I was born).

I'm very much afraid I will answer this question differently if asked five years from now.

Ironically, much of what Bush did in response to 9/11 has since been judged (a few times by the Supreme Court, no less) outside the constitutional remit of the chief executive.

:D

Interestingly, though, this post neatly sums up the dichotomy of thought on Bush, and using Carter as a comparison in this sense is actually very revealing.

It's generally assumed (certainly in this thread) that Carter's faults mainly stem from a lack of action when confronted with big problems. On the flipside, it's generally assumed (again, certainly in this thread and in FOFC political discussions) that, aside from "My Pet Goat", the response of the Bush Administration to 9/11 did not suffer from a lack of action.

Thus we divide into two camps. Those who applaud the direct action, and either praise the results or consider the results irrelevant, vs. those who view the direct action and its results as only furthering the overall problem.