Worst President in your lifetime?
 

I think we can all agree that there just isn't enough political discussion here at FOFC. With that in mind, who was the worst President in your lifetime?

Poll to come.

No one will ever beat Bush Jr.

ACCCK! Can't believe I typoed Reagan's name....

Amazing, someone actually thinks that Obama has done the worst in just over a year of being in office... That's as bad as someone saying he's the best in just over a year as well...

I guess technically I was alive for a bit of Carter, wish I could change the pick.

this thread's going to get ugly quick.

With the voting I'm seeing, it's already ugly.

I am going to need a few years before I can answer.....barring a miraculous turn around of saving baby seals, curing cancer and aids single handedly, and re freezing the polar ice caps, I think the answer is smoking a cigarette right now.

I thought he quit smoking, no?

LOL @ anyone voting for Obama. MBBF and Vex how are you able to judge when he hasn't even finished his term.

I actually flipped a coin between Obama and Carter. Obama was unlucky enough to win the coin flip.

From my selfish point of view, easily Ronald Reagan.

The guy was a horrible President for agriculture. That food came from the store was about all he knew about ag.

I think you need to talk to Lungs about selling this bullshit.

lungs voted for Obama in the other thread as Best President. Just as bad as voting worst here. I doubt MizzouBBallFan's going to get much quality help in that direction (although lungs can certainly help him with the bullshit).

As bad as parts of Bush/Obama have been, I think people forget how the complete clusterf*ck the country was during Carter's term. When they create a "misery index" to measure how miserable people are during your presidency, I think you win this by default. ;)

I didn't take the best President thread seriously, as I don't think we've had a truly great President in my lifetime so I voted for Obama to counteract the votes he gets for worst President in this thread :)

Easily Dubya. I was born in 1980, FWIW, so technically I had a bit of Carter, but George W. Bush was worse.

Anyone who isn't voting Carter is either young or naive. Stagflation ftl.

I could see a Carter vote easily enough but only counted Presidents that I felt old enough to really know the impact.

Reagan was good. Bush Sr. was merely okay. Clinton was good when he kept it in his pants. Bush Jr. was okay at times. Obama is leading us into communism so we have a "winner".

We have had some shitty ones in the last few decades, but how anyone could avoid voting for W is beyond me. He was able to turn a suprlus into massive deficit, start two endless and pointless wars, while finishing his term with one of the country's worst financial meltdowns in history.

I would rank from best to worst in my lifetime as:

1) Clinton
2) George H.W. Bush
3) Reagan
4) George W. Bush

I think H.W gets a bad rap. He really took over at a shitty time and made some promises he couldn't keep. But I thought he was smart, knew how to handle a war, and cushioned the blow of a bigger mess.

As for Obama, it's impossible to judge him. His policies have not had any impact yet on the country and won't be known for years. Those voting for him are not playing with a full deck.

Oh I forgot that Obama was leading us into communism. Can I change my vote now?

Carter and W are a tie for me. Both were ineffectual little nothings.

this thread needs more debate. i'll start.

my political opinions are vastly more nuanced and informed than yours. furthermore:

Attachment 1513

I didn't know Janet Reno was a Browns fan.

Crap I accidently voted for H.W. Bush when I meant to hit W.

At the very least Carter didn't start any pointless wars... so he has that over W.

It takes a lot of time to fairly judge a president. I voted for Nixon, not necessarily because of policy, but because of other reasons.

In 1975, Nixon would have won a poll like this in a landslide. Now many historians think he was a decent president. Ronnie is on a vast majorities top 10 list now. Up to 1996, historians voted him as low as the 25th ranked president of all time.

We won't know who was best/worst until long after we are all dead.

Ya, Nixon's kind of a sleeper in this poll. History has been pretty kind to him.

OH NOES! COMMUNISM!

It's funny to remember the liberals screaming about Fascism during GW's reign, and now listen to the screaming about communism. Sure, political debate would be a lot easier if we lived in a place where things were actually that drastic, and we didn't have to discuss nuances and facts. But can we stop, as a society, with the theatrics?

Maybe Carter was ineffective, but W was almost flat-out evil, and unbelievably destructive, in my humble opinion.

Clinton is the reason there is so much dissension between the parties nowadays anyway...

For the record, I design and test the government systems that take your tax dollars and pays them out in the form of subsidies to lungs for his milk. So there's already an indirect exchange of BS. :)

I don't know how to judge whether a President is good or not. They don't have stats like on-base percentage or goals against average or anything to measure them on. Hell, we can't even pick something like how many championships they won. This is pretty much the same as asking who the worst main character on "Cheers" was.

So I'm voting for Kodos just because he started this.

I don't think he's so much a sleeper as he doesn't qualify in a lot of people's "in my lifetime." And probably a few others that were too young to really even think about him. The poll is not "worst president of the last century"

I didn't know that Elton John liked football!

I'm not going to go so far as to call him evil, but otherwise I agree with this. I don't think history is going to be kind to the aughts in general.

My first presidential vote was in 1980. Despite my liberal nature I was unable to vote for Carter. I went third party.

You should probably learn what communism is first.

Communism is whatever Glen Beck says it is.

How'd that work out for you?

You need to check out Presidential Prospectus.com.

PLEASE MAKE THIS HAPPEN

I didn't vote for a winning Presidential candidate until 2008. So I'm on a roll!

Keep plucking that chicken.

We might agree but for very different reasons. Politics has never been civil but the bloodthirsty partisanship of today was born in the 1994 midterm elections when the GOP ran a vicious anti-Clinton campaign that really changed the tone of politics. In his second term, the hatred of the far right due to Clinton's poor personal choices led to a level of attack we hadn't seen in American politics in a while, and that gave way to the Rise of Karl Rove. On a visciousness scale, Clinton isn't even in the ballpark of the what's happening today.

As for my vote, I probably should have gone with Nixon but he actually had some victories before his poor personal choices did him in. Carter was a sorry president but the Camp David Accords remain the single greatest Middle East peace accomplishment ever. He was stuck between a rock and a hard place between Iran and the economy, and I'm not sure there was a way out of either one.

W however took the cake for managing to do what no one else has ever done ... fuck up both the economy and foreign relations. Even Hoover didn't do both of those.

Karl Rove wasn't possible without Lee Atwater.

I don't know about that. There has always been heavy dissension amongst parties and politicians. In fact, it might even be a bit more civil these days compared to the times when Andrew Jackson's wife was being called a whore by opposing politicians.

I think what's changed is technology. Whether it's the internet, cable "news" or talk radio. The fringe element of politics has been able to find a voice and been given credibility by these forms of media. Ann Coulter would be seen as the crazy chick in town in the past, but now is given a platform that makes her look like a legitimate voice for a party. So when breaking news happens, she's called on to give analysis. 30 years ago she'd be sitting in a lawn chair in her yard yelling at the garbage truck while the town laughed.

I think politics were a lot more bloodthirsty circa 1860

That's just about exactly what I was talking about. Although I blamed the Clinton's, since it was their stupid personal choices with Whitewater, Lewinsky, etc that led to it.

Easily: Jimmy Carter.

And yes, these are all of the presidents in my lifetime.

Nixon is before my lifetime, otherwise he'd have to be a serious contender.

Carter wasn't a good President, but not all of his failures were of his own making.

I think it would be hard to argue against W. Budget surpluses to huge deficits and debt. Booming economy to Great Recession. Stock bubble. Housing Bubble. Deregulation of the financial sector and a stated unwillingness to investigate obvious cases of fraud on Wall Street that led directly to the financial system collapse. Two unresolved wars, one of which was based on false presences.

Simply put, W consistently either made bad decisions, or chose a course of inaction, that had catastrophic consequences, and was equally unprepared to deal with those consequences.