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People, not knowing presidential history, tend to weigh their judgments towards the presidents of their own lifetime and measure them against what was going on at the time. If you lean towards the conservative side of the aisle during Biden's time he is the worst and Trump was the best. During Trump's time his acolytes claimed he was the best and Obama was the worst. During Bush's (43) time, especially post 9/11, he was the best and Clinton was the worst. I'm just going to skip Bush (41) other than to say that Carter was the worst while Reagan was the best. And so it goes clear back to the beginning of time. The funny thing is that if you support the other side the entire scale of judgment inverts. Everybody who was the best becomes the worst and all of the worst become the best. With time people tend to forget whatever was going on at the time and the presidents of those days and their accomplishments become totally forgotten.
The problem here is that there is no accepted standard of judgment for a president. If a businessman takes over the country, as if it was his own personal business and things are going well, his supporters forget the obvious violations of the Constitution and start calling him the greatest president of all time. Or if he gives you everything you want at public expense.
They tend to forget little things like the fact that if Washington didn't do what he did there would never have been a United States to begin with. He took a country that didn’t exist, from a country that was the most powerful and expansive empire in world history, fought a war for independence, was instrumental in writing the Constitution, giving that country its turn to become the most powerful and expansive empire in world history. Wouldn’t that qualify as an act deserving of being named the greatest president of all time? I think it would. In spite of his faults even the best of his successors could only claim to expertly or poorly maintain what he had put there, in spite of all of the odds against him, in the first place.
As far as the worst goes when is the last time you heard someone talk about John Adams and his Alien and Sedition Acts? You think Joe Biden is divisive? John Adam's stance on France as well as his general divisiveness created a climate where Representative Roger Griswold of Connecticut attacked Representative Matthew Lyon of Vermont on the House Floor beating him with a wooden cane.
Contemporary with that was the election where Jefferson challenged and won against Adams, the insults between the two were so legendary that historians comment on it to this day. Jefferson's campaign accused President Adams of having a "hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman." So naturally Adam’s men called then Vice President Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, "a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father." Depending on who you listened to Adams was a fool, a hypocrite, a criminal, and a tyrant or Jefferson was a weakling, an atheist, a libertine, and a coward.
The only thing that makes this different than today's often repeated (repeated and repeated again) mantra of "greatest president ever!" is that at the time there were only two to choose from.
Regarding divisiveness how about a guy who was so divisive that he actually split the country and killed an estimated two and a half percent of the American population? How about that trifling little business of killing more American soldiers than all other wars combined? Obama and Biden didn't kill two and a half percent of the American population in an unnecessary and unconstitutional war. And yet somehow that guy is considered to be an example of one of the best. Those who say “Lincoln was the greatest president ever!” don’t usually take into account the simple fact that Lincoln's war was more deadly than Idi Amin.
Yes. I said it. Lincoln was worse than Idi Amin. That’s by the standard of measuring the number of American deaths, something a good president always avoids, and how many times and how grossly he violated the Constitution, which following it, regardless of circumstances, is his duty by oath.
I’ve got a rather revolutionary idea. Let’s just say the presidents who kill the largest number of Americans are immediately candidates for being the worst presidents ever. That’s a good standard for a president. Don’t kill a lot of Americans and follow the Constitution.
Speaking of the presidents and the Constitution, did you ever wonder why James Madison’s face isn’t on Mount Rushmore in place of Lincoln’s? I mean the guy who wrote the Constitution versus the guy who made it possible for it to be destroyed? And we went with latter of the two rather than the former?
Bringing that effect, Lincoln’s war, up to present times, there is the simple fact that without Lincoln and his policies of expansionist government there'd have been no Obama or Biden. Had the federal government been held to the pre-Civil War constitutional standard by the American People neither of the two most current jokers would have been possible.
On the flip side we have a quiet guy like Ike, who is credited with winning WWII, getting America over the trauma of a post world war while his policies held off the Soviets and launching one of the more prosperous times in American history. And he had manners. But that’s a personal preference of mine. I tend to like the quiet ones.
Please, people, there were better presidents than Trump and worse ones than Biden or Obama. Study all of American history. Not just the presidents of your lifetime according to the Main Stream Media. As a constitutionalist I'd recommend you read the Constitution, learn it well and judge the presidents by their actions in support of it or against it and forget about all of the rest. Get away from the judgments of professional historians. Read the accounts of the losers of conflicts as well as the history written by the victors.
What do I think is a good example of a good president for modern times? As I said, I tend to like the quiet ones. None of them were quieter than Calvin Coolidge.
He had a wide spread reputation for not speaking unless he had to. His nickname was “Silent Cal.” He was commonly described as laconic. Not only did this apply to his presidency but his life in general. Once President Coolidge was seated next to a chatty woman at a dinner party who said to him “I bet I can get you to say more than two words.” His response; "You lose," is both classy and classic. I tend to like the simple, elegant, witty way of saying what needs to be said, without being a bloviating ass-hat, endlessly commenting on the subject of how great you are and how evil everybody who opposes you is. There is something to be said for being a consummate and professional statesman. They win people over.
Sometimes I find myself shouting at the video on my monitor, “Okay! I get it! Everybody is mean to you! You poor, poor baby! But what are you going to do about following your oath!?”
There is a big difference between saying what needs to be said and just plain being mean about it. That’s what Americans loved about Reagan. You remember him? The guy who took the country by landslide twice? The guy who in his second election took forty-nine states? Was he critical about the Demoncraps? Yep. However he defeated them by politely persuading the swing votes away from them while making the argument for his base. Interlaced with his criticism of his political opponents was a calm persuasive logic and an inimitable sense of humor.
Were I a betting man I’d guess that Reagan was a big Coolidge fan… (Note: As I typed this line the thought crossed my mind that I should look into this. So I just now looked this up, as a matter of fact, and it turns out that he was.
But as president you do have to say what needs to be said, do what needs to be done and have a spine about it. As governor of Massachusetts one of the things Coolidge had to deal with was a policeman’s strike in Boston. Riots and chaos ensued. Coolidge’s response? "There is no right to strike against the public safety, anywhere, anytime." Then he fired them all for abandoning their posts. On the flip side he did everything he could do to get the fired policemen jobs outside of the Police Department.
One of the things that Coolidge and Reagan had in common is that they were not sold on the line that the federal government is the best way to get to economic prosperity. They were more of the mind that that’s a job for the People rather than the government. For myself I can’t stand it when a federal official brags about how many jobs they created. It’s not their job to create jobs. It’s much better when they get the government out of the way and let the People create the jobs for themselves.
National debt post WWI was nine times higher than it had ever been before. Income tax was high. Jobs were scarce. Angry and unemployed veterans of WWI were roaming the streets in poverty. Prices for food and clothing were double what they were before the war.
This was the state of the country when Coolidge stepped onto the national scene. In spite of a large number of failures in his life he always pushed on. His perseverance in the face of political opposition was astounding and the key to his success. In the middle of his presidency his sixteen year old son died and one could even make the argument that after that his wife, for a time, left him because of his presidency. Did he complain about his detractors about how mean they were to him? Did he back down? Did he complain that he really didn’t want to sign the bills for all of the spending sent to him but he felt he had to?
No he didn’t. He instead hired a guy named Andrew Mellon to be his Secretary of the Treasury. Mellon is famous for creating the idea he called Scientific Taxation. This is basically the idea that the lower the taxes the greater the growth and consequently the higher the revenue. As a result there was enough wealth for everybody, so much so that the government could get by on taking only a tiny fraction of it. This policy has a history of working exceptionally well. Less government, more fun.
Coolidge vetoed a lot of bills for spending even during a time when military costs, veteran’s funding and the national debt made up more than half of the spending. He cut federal expenditures savagely. There was once even a parody of “A Christmas Carol” with President Coolidge in the part of Ebenezer Scrooge.
The top income tax rate came down by half while the federal debt was reduced by a third. In fact the budget was always in surplus. Unemployment was less than five percent, sometimes as low as three percent. Houses were converting to electricity, phones were being installed all over the country and people were buying cars. Why? Because the federal government wasn’t sucking the money out of the economy, of course. Yet the economy grew strongly and the federal government shrank. Wages rose and interest rates fell. Less money for the government equals more money for everybody else.
So, how about the actions of the president who launched the roaring twenties? A time in American history which was so prosperous that it is still talked about a hundred years later? Greatest president ever? Maybe not but he was certainly one of the better ones.
Like he said in this video, “I want the People of America to be able to work less for the government and more for themselves. I want them to have the rewards of their own industry. This is the chief meaning of freedom. Until we can reestablish a condition under which the earnings of the People can be kept by the People we are bound to suffer a very severe and distinct curtailment of our liberty.”
He was not arrogant about how he was the right guy to save us. He said that he would get the government out of our way so we could save ourselves. He said he would let us live our own lives.
He said “It is much more important to kill bad bills than to pass good ones.”
To end this post I would like to share the following words from Coolidge’s Inaugural Address:
“The wisest and soundest method of solving our tax problem is through economy…The collection of any taxes which are not absolutely required, which do not beyond reasonable doubt contribute to the public welfare, is only a species of legalized larceny. Under this republic the rewards of industry belong to those who earn them. The only constitutional tax is the tax which ministers to public necessity. The property of the country belongs to the people of the country. Their title is absolute. They do not support any privileged class; they do not need to maintain great military forces; they ought not to be burdened with a great array of public employees.”—Calvin Coolidge
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