Stirling Newberry asks if Obama is the worst president in American History

Best/worst isn’t the rubric that intrigues me. But the colossal missed opportunities to effect real change, to kick former paradigms on their arse, that nags at me. Sept. 2001 and Jan. 2009–just in the last decade America has had two such opportunities. Doubtful that we’ll have another in time to avert catastrophe. And even if one does present itself, again we’ll have men like Obushama in charge, men who have been groomed their entire lives to hew to the status quo, to trust in our failed institutions, defined by corporate values as they are.

Stirling Newberry, at his best, can be so startlingly clear. The first thing to jump out at me was his simple epigrammatic summary of ideal policy in response to the economic crisis: the job of policy is to recover and restructure.

How many times have I seen our neo-liberals debating with their libertarian-conservative counterparts about whether unemployment is cyclical “or” structural? As if, it is a matter of “or”, and not both, or one after the other. When our professional partisan pundits make themselves, and “us”, stupid, debating their false dichotomies, it is no wonder that so many cannot get a clear view of our leaders or their performance.

He makes a pretty strong case. Let’s face it: Buchanan wasn’t solely responsible for the Civil War, so the ceiling for worst one-term president is lower than many people think.

The more we see from Obama, the more mendacious and harmful he is revealed to be. I just saw Senator Luis Gutierrez on tv talking about Obama’s full-bore prosecution and deportation of illegal immigrants, even those who have families with children here in this country. Obama doesn’t have to behave so destructively but he wants to and so he does, with weak insistences that he can’t do anything because Congress won’t pass laws specifically mandating he do what his supporters want him to do. Meanwhile he fights tooth and nail, with every fiber of his being and every tool in his arsenal, to get a debt ceiling deal that will cut Social Security and Medicare. He pressures Congressmen, he holds press conferences, he calls on the public, he shops around for legal advice that suits his ear. He campaigns–hard–for what he wants, but throws up his hands in mock defeat when his supporters who put him in office ask him to do otherwise. Just when I think I can’t get more sick of him than I already am, I’m proven wrong.

Worst ever? He’s certainly in contention, which is a crime against the polity.

I still rank Reagan as the “worst” of all 20th century presidents, because Reagan was a transformative president. Reagan either started the ball rolling on all the problems we have today or if they pre-existed, exacerbated them mightily. More to the point, Reagan defined a political landscape that ensured that what he did would only be furthered, not rolled back.

Reagan gave the Republican Party their SOP for winning elections: nominate the likeable useful idiot, someone who could convince many Americans he’s really for them because he truly believes it himself, and thus comes across as genuine. But that’s because he’s too stupid to have any good grasp of his policy effects. No Reagan, and the Right would have been kicked out of power in 1984 (even then Reagan wasn’t terribly popular much of his first term) and US history would have been different, and better.

After that, Bush II. Clinton didn’t roll back Reagan, and continued and even enhanced the neoliberal agenda, but at least the Clinton era saw a modest recovery for the middle- and lower-class people and put the government’s fiscal house in order. Bush was an economic disaster on almost all conceivable fronts. Obama’s crime is largely continue and enhance Bush’s policies.

I don’t see any good end to this. Obama’s discrediting “liberalism” by being portrayed as a “liberal” in the media and setting the stage for President Teabagger in 2012. Ian has predicted this, and predicted that there *might* be a chance for recovery/reform in 2016 because President Teabagger’s policies will make things worse and they might be therefore out in a year, though the US will be in terrible straits by that time.

But I have my doubts. The Teabaggers already are reminding me of the 1920s and 30s fascists, and like them, their conservative handlers who propelled them to power are finding them not easily controlled. Already the Republicans in many states are rolling back voting rights. As their policies worsen things, and more voters turn against them, what’s to stop them from responding by simply continuing to disenfranchise more and more voters by hook or by crook to continue to win elections? I can imagine that happening.

That is Obama’s greatest claim to “worst”–that he had the best, and possibly the last, chance to avoid disaster. Despite his being smarter than Bush (though terribly conventional in his smarts) and far more eloquent his idea of a “transformative” isn’t at all what the people who voted for him wanted.

StewartM

Is it really germane who’s the worst president? History can be argued until the cows disappear.
The here and now isn’t even well understood and that’s what’s driving this train over the cliff.
If the citizens of the U.S. don’t get a handle on today; tomorrow won’t mean diddly squat and the past? Well, does one really give a shit?

@sunsin – Are you saying that Obama winning a second term would mean that he….wasn’t a bad president? Obama winning another term would be catastrophic. A Republican president will be terrible, but it would give us a chance in 2016 for a non-plutocratic, assassinating candidate. After four more years of Obama (and four more years of depression and war), 2016 will go to anyone who’s not on the team of that Socialist Marxist Obama. Not to mention the damage he’d do in the intervening four years.

That the Republican Right has been systematically and successfully pursuing a program of pro-plutocratic institutional reform for 30 years is lost behind Chris Matthews rolling his eyes at Michelle Bachmann’s latest stupid bon mot. A little, grounded perspective in policy and its consequences does reduce the confusion, even if it doesn’t relieve the hopelessness.

Yes, Bruce, but once you understand the mechanism, obsessive discussion and analysis and of the minutiae becomes what I can only describe as an addiction. Like I said on the other thread, I know people, and they’re not a minority, who spend their entire lives analyzing the absurd, and largely valueless, minutiae of the greatest Bread & Circus offering ever concocted, Professional Sports. It’s a very close-fitting metaphor. Political hacks, Politico as an example, are glued to the jockeying, in fact, it’s the reason for its existence as an entity. What on earth would it do without the feigned drama? The Shock! The latest Scandal!

We know that the U.S. Government is owned by the Corporations, lock, stock and barrel, and that any legislation that has any impact on the profits of the Plutocratic Shareholders of the Corporations, the 1%, will be, and is, determined by said Corporations with their vested interests in mind. I have made the argument that a system that has allowed this to happen is a flawed system, so the idea of reform is not only too little, too late, but it’s also futile. Another system must be found and implemented, and in order to do that, yes, we must understand the current system in order not to repeat the same mistakes, however, we must also be willing to step outside the box and concede that just because something was before, and has always been since the manifestation of Civilization, does not mean it should be now, or always will be. When I hear otherwise intelligent people put fundamentalist restrictions on creative thought like this, it makes me want to scream. Ironically, many of these otherwise intelligent individuals have eschewed the nonsense of traditional religion, but they appear to not have lost religion, meaning they have merely replaced one set of inflexible convictions with another. God for Economics of Empire, in its many forms.

Considering the above, I consider the exercise of ranking Presidents to be the epitome of inanity. It draws people back to the now archaic notion that the President is somehow running the show, when in fact, the position is now purely symbolic and ceremonial. That’s not to say that the Executive Branch doesn’t have, and doesn’t wield, significant power. It does, but the President himself/herself, as an individual, is meaningless in that equation other than as a symbolic illusion. To rank Presidents as better or worse, is to give the illusion legitimacy, and IMHO, that’s regressive, entrapping thinking.

“I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am president, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank.”
-Barack Obama, Oct 27, 2007

Now he’s back on his toes – all he wants to do is make the issue go away, an issue which he could’ve made go away a long time ago.

Bullshit, Bullshit, Bullshit!!!! More apologist crap. They’re all playing for the same Team…..and you’re not on it. They wear different uniforms (i.e. the empty rhetoric that issues forth from their filthy mouths) in order to obfuscate their shared loyalty to the sanctity of the One Percenters.

Formerly T-Bear:

sorry, them’s the history I was taught and recall, if your history is different, keep your historical opinions to yourself,sorry, them’s the history I was taught and recall, if your history is different, keep your historical opinions to yoursel

Then you learned the pro-southern perspective of Reconstruction. You learned the same one I learned. It’s largely inaccurate.

I for one am not interested in hearing revisionist trash

“Revisionism” in history happens for the same reason “revisionism” happens in other disciplines–there’s new data uncovered, a new technique invented, or a new perspective employed. “Revisionism” in history need not be some dirty word.

The history I was also taught gave me a map of colonial North America divided up into the English colonies, New France, and New Spain. That map was far more a fiction than the truth–there was not an iota of information about the people actually living in most of those places, the Native American peoples. I rather suspect if you had gone to West Tennessee and talked to a Chickasaw and asked him “How you like living in New France now?” he’d look at you a bit funny. He might have never seen a Frenchman and, although buried in the very heart of New France, the Chickasaw were allies with the English.

The history I was taught also had its fair share of the stories of Very Important Dead White Guys and wars too, and was short on economic analysis, social history, scientific and technological history, and other stuff. Until computers were common, there wasn’t the ability to crunch lots of numbers on, say, the prices of livestock in Moravia in the 15th century. The Soviet archives coming open have allowed people like David Glantz to write books on the WWII Eastern front from the Soviet point of view instead of the memoirs of defeated Nazis and German military records.

In short–the vast majority of historical revisionism is good. And yes, while there are the popular revisionist histories put out which are nakedly politically motivated (aka Jonah Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism), these are nearly always not the works of historians. No expert of fascism, such as a Robert Paxton, thinks of Liberal Fascism as anything more than a waste of good wood pulp.

-StewartM

-StewartM

@ Stewart M

You are probably a dear boy and your mother loved you very much. I don’t have the faintest clue what you are on about. Please don’t assume your experience and education equates to what mine was, nor were your instructors of the same calibre. If you insist they were, you are a fool, please continue with your opinions, and prove it.

rather than enaging in obnoxious and pompous, though amusing, preening.

I think one of these is in order:

http://roflrazzi.files.wordpress.com/2009/09/celebrity-pictures-dug-licking-balls.jpg

Obama as Worst. President. Ever.? To be honest, I think Shrub worked too hard for that title to lose it in 2 1/2 short years.

How about… Worse. Than. Bush.

This may have been Johnson’s great mistake, and a mistake many historians believe Lincoln would not have made.

I think it’s clear from the links I provided that Lincoln would have found a way to export the ex-slaves per the links I provided. Afterall, in his own words, Blacks and Whites could not live together because Whites were superior to Blacks. Obviously, he didn’t believe all men were created equal….only all White men were created equal.

W still gets my vote for worst. O is not even close to catching him.

Sorry, delete the previous comment.

Here it is formatted correctly:

I think it’s clear from the links I provided that Lincoln would have found a way to export the ex-slaves per the links I provided.

The gradual abolition of slavery followed by black emigration was always Henry Clay’s pet project (he was the president of the American Colonization Society). Lincoln always admired Clay and referred to himself as “a Clay man” early in his political career. Some abolitionists were also advocates for emigration early on.

It is true that Lincoln kept pressing to explore emigration as a “solution” to America’s race problem as president. He didn’t get very far, and some historians think his continued efforts to be a sop to racism in the North to counter the backlash he got for the Emancipation Proclamation (even some abolitionists likewise used racist arguments in their advocacy, saying that abolition would keep blacks “down there” and not force them to run “up here” to gain freedom) . It must be remembered that while Lincoln continued to make noises about emigration and colonization, he also as early as 1854 recognized the enormous practical difficulties of the emigration “solution”. He was resisted by African-American leaders in the North, who pointed out that 180,000 African-Americans were fighting for the North, that African-Americans weren’t the cause of America’s race “problem”, and if anyone should be forced to emigrate it should be treasonous white slaveowners. That argument was rather hard to refute. Abolitionists too by Lincoln’s presidency had largely abandoned emigration schemes, so emigration had little support from “the left” back then.

To me, the cinching point that Lincoln was turning away from emigration and colonization schemes towards a measure of African-American citizenship was his last public speech on April 11th, 1865, where he cautiously advocated African-American voting rights. John Wilkes Booth was in the crowd listening, and his reaction was to it was:

“That means nigger citizenship. By God, I’ll put him through. That is the last speech he will ever give”.

Booth sure thought that Lincoln was moving towards a measure of equality. It doesn’t make sense to start advocating suffrage rights to people who you want to encourage to leave.

StewartM

turning the question around:
“who was the ‘best’ president?”

Then there is a quite absurd debate, whether the ‘best’ could not have been even better.

Which reminds me of Kant, who endorsed the inferiority of the blacks, but on the other hand was one of the premier thinkers of the enlightenment.

Same with the founding fathers and the early presidents.
Jefferson the slaveholder etc.

As Morocco Bama rightly pointed (me) to Michael Parentis treatment of the matter.
After watching Parenti, I am not totally convinced that the project of the founding fathers was purely elitist .
It HAD elitist components, but was not purely elitist in the contemporary sense.
They simply did not know better, and only after decades of struggle, the core of the matter was exposed.
Which led to the civil war etc.

What one learns from that is, that ONLY in times of big challenge epic leaders of great stature can flourish.

In latter times presidents seem to have learned:
They can only style themselves as ‘big’, when the times are tough.
So they eventually create those tough times, just to make them look bigger.
Disaster-capitalism and other methods.

Obama ist not one of those.
He is – in all probability- born/thrown into the situation, and fails miserably, for some hidden reasons, which are embedded in the ‘power-structure’.
At least this is my impression.

I do not want to defend Obama, but blaming him alone would grossly miss the point.

Referring back to Jefferson, Lincoln, FDR as GREAT Presidents reveals THEIR weak spots, which they definitely had in the rear view.
Voting for the ‘best’ among the lot would miss the point.
American passion for misconceived numberings and rankings.
Take Your medicine.

The problem I see with the latter day Presidents, from Reagan on laterwards is, that presidential power continually diminished , and the structural elements continually increased, may this be financing elections or the various lobbies.
(Note: it must not necessarily be a bad thing to limit presidential power, but if some congress/senate-crazies are in the drivers seat, it is relevant, that it is not, but this is a very fragile construct, and finally a gamble, which means that the electoral process for president somehow cancels out the illnesses of the election of congressmen and senators. This is a defunct statistical argument: that evil+evil somehow cancel out, which obviously they do not.)

So how can anybody ask whether ‘Obama is the worst’?

It is the system, stupid.
Elect Jesus, and he would be murdered.

The phantasy is, that somehow the vote puts in position a president, who represents the electorate

So whats the point?
You can vote as you will. The Candidate serves a lot of masters, and the voter is amongst the last to be served.

You know it . I know it.
So why we argueing on that in the first place?

I don’t agree with the liberal blame game on everything ronald reagan. krugman does this shit all the time. reagan didn’t put hypnotic spells on all the presidents that followed him … they served corporate amerika for their own … very often selfish … reasons. And, as far as I know, he also didn’t change the campaign laws to make it easier to bribe and corrupt those politicians.

reagan wouldn’t even get near the current republican ticket … nor the democratic ticket … he’d be a huckabee wannabe … becoz he wasn’t subservient ENOUGH to corporate amerika as the current band of head jackasses are in BOTH parties. Corporate amerika wouldn’t fund him becoz they wouldn’t get as much from him as they do from their current errand boys.

ronald reagan did a lot of things that damaged this country … that is true. Appointing alan greenspan might be at the very top of them. But ronald reagan raised taxes on ge … who he used to draw a paycheck from … becoz he felt that they weren’t paying enough taxes. ronald reagan raised income taxes … several times … when tax revenue didn’t meet his projections. ronald reagan left beirut with his tail between his legs rather than place American soldiers in any more danger … he took the blame, he swallowed his pride, he greeted the families of the dead ones, he took their deserved shit, and he didn’t allow his own personal ego to put others in further danger. Can you imagine any of these current mfers doing any of that? I don’t. And it certainly ain’t ronald reagan’s … who has been out of office for over 20 years and is currently dead … fault that they don’t.

Z

groo, excellent post. I agree with most all of it, and the sentiment. Too bad most aren’t listening and continue to single out the two-bit actors, rather than the structure itself, as is witnessed by the posts between your last and this one.

People love the curtain, rather than what’s behind it.

Morocco Bama,

You over-assume stupidity.

You mean the system puts these amoral-immoral bastards in office?! No shit?! WOW!!!! Thanks for the fucking revelation.

Z

Morocco Bama:

So, we have Lincoln, in late Autumn of 1864, in a private correspondence, which was much later made public, still pushing for exportation of the ex-slaves when it was, at least at that time, economically untenable, and yet, as you have mentioned, we have him just several months later, in a public speech, “cautiously advocating” voting rights for Blacks and, presumably, accepting a future in which they are U.S. Citizens. We have a contradiction, and suffice it to say, I’m not one to believe he changed his mind, or feelings, in a few short months, or perhaps we are talking about the “Public” man, or a better term would be the Politically Expedient man, and the “Private” man. Sometimes, if we were to use Venn Diagrams for illustrative purposed, the two overlap, but other times they are quite divergent. The “Politically Expedient” man must, and will, and does, lie on occasion, some more than others, as a matter of practicality, but ultimately it is a betrayal of his inner-most, “Private” self, and his true convictions, and a shielding of it from the light of “Public” day.

Yes, Morocco, but one must consider also other specifics. Your “private/public” argument presumes that there would be more pushback from the colonization efforts than there would be from some sort of black citizenship. While the first was doomed by impracticalities, the second was political dynamite for most of the war–and not just in the South, that was still fighting, but in the North as well. To use a crude modern analogy from the health care debate, it’s as if Lincoln were privately advocating Obamacare and publically advocating a national health service and a Medicare-for-all program. The latter is more “dynamite” than the former.

Scholars have known about this a long time, while the document in your link may be new, it’s old news (contrary to what your first link implied). Some scholars like Stephen B. Oates have concluded that Lincoln pursuing colonization was done as political window-dressing, to demonstrate these impracticalities; but I think even if that were not the case, they way the colonization efforts played out one would think that it would have caused Lincoln to conclude that colonization was a fool’s errand. Moreover, by 1865, Lincoln’s “left” at the time had coalesced around some form of black citizenship and voting, so there was little political support for colonization either. It just wasn’t going to happen.

Finally, I’d like to leave an observation of Frederick Douglas about Lincoln. Douglas could be as frustrated as any other “progressive” of the era with Lincoln’s slowness to embrace reform and perceived obtuseness. Douglas however said that Lincoln’s virtue was that when he finally *did* move, it was nearly always in the right direction, and moreover you could count on said move to be permanent (again, unlike Obama). The Emancipation Proclamation, for instance, was not only denounced in the South but in many places in the North; whole Union regiments sent proclamations how they would not fight to free slaves. Yet despite this backlash Lincoln, after having issued it, and seeing the contributions that African-Americans were making to the Union effort, said he would be sooner die than retract a single word of it.

StewartM

No, Reagan didn’t hypnotize those who followed, but he did set things in motion, which had consequences, which constrained the politics that followed. The politics of changing the rules, of changing the institutions within which people compete and cooperate, is the politics of trying to find ways to tie the hands of those, who follow. Not easy to do, but not impossible either.

This thread has disappointed me. “Lincoln was not the Saint he’s been made out to be . . .” Really, ‘bama? The man won a civil war of vast scope, wrote the Gettysburg Address and his two inaugurals, and freed the slaves, and you are going to quibble over his alleged character defects, based on some manuvering over colonization; why not go over his similar letters on compensated emancipation?

The President of the United States, by design, is a kind of elective King, modeled on a Whiggish mythology of English Kings. The Presidential monarch is a focus of the nation’s politics, a fulcrum on which the evolution of institutions and the meaning of the nation’s politics is levered by hands, alternatively mighty and palsied. A President stands alone and apart, amidst a chaotic sea of contending forces: of ambitious men, competing ideas, and conflicting interests. A President can be the still center of gravity for that chaos, and shape that chaos into coherence, with his leadership, whether it is by means of his eloquence and use of the ye ol’ bully pulpit, deft use of his power of appointment, or his ability to set a political agenda. Making lists of best and worst, is just a way of making a summary judgment of this history of institution-building (or institution-destruction), just as a good judge, writing an opinion in support of a judicial decision, marshals history and facts in proof of justice.

What does a Monarch or President do? What’s his function? He, or she, leads. But, “leads” is a bit ambiguous in its emptiness. “Speaks for the country”, articulating national purposes and committments, is certainly part of the job description. Policymaking — a role the English monarch or American President conspicuously shares with, or alienates to, other institutions, is not just ambiguous, it is confusing. If we focus too short-sightedly on the “policy” of the day, we risk personalizing as some kind of personal preference, the conflicting ideas and interests, which must be reconciled by the functioning of the institution. This unimaginative personalization, in the first stirring of political theory, is how the 16th and 17th century got the curse of absolute monarchy. And, such short-sighted focus on policy minutiae also prevents us from glimpsing the broader outline of the making and unmaking of institutions, and how the great Presidents bind the generation that follows.

The first English kings were warriors, and their success or failure rested, often, on their strategic competence, and even on their charismatic charm as battlefield leaders. That’s no longer a role we expect a national leader to assume, although the Right still glories in the President, as Commander-in-Chief. In Whiggish retrospective, English kings were celebrated in the strength for their promotion of the King’s law, in refining the bureaucracy of chancellery and property law, and in their weakness, for the strengthening of Parliament. While consciously playing the game of thrones, the Kings, often unconsciously and inadvertently, in failure as much as success, channeled the resolution of political conflicts into the development and evolution of institutions.

In this tradition, the best and greatest Presidents are Lincoln, Washington and FDR, while the near-greats might include Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson and some others from the list of the successful, mayhaps. The destructiveness of their institutional, political and policy legacies makes it difficult for a liberal to decide what to do with Nixon and Reagan. (Trivia alert: the most successful President to be forgotten: James K. Polk.)

“Best and greatest” rests, implicitly, on the contributions these Presidents made to the development of the institutions of democratic government and the sense and coherence of national purpose and identity.

For someone like Newberry, who has a long perspective on institutional politics and economics, Obama’s Presidency must seem a national horror show. That so many of our contemporaries look on complacently, approving of the color of his skin or his Lincoln-like dilatoriness on the fast-moving issues of gay rights, must be a cause of still deeper despair. Certainly, that’s how I feel.

I suppose the truth of the long Nixon-Reagan phase of the dismantling of the New Deal lies not in the personality of Obama, but in the vacuousness of the latter-day liberal and progressive sentiment, which chose him, which preferred symbolism to power, which complained about and jeered at movement conservatism, for 30 years without ever doing the hard work of criticizing it or opposing it.

The institutions of liberal and progressive politics were attacked by the conservatives systematically and effectively — attacked and destroyed. Most liberals, today, could hardly name them, and many leading liberal voices in the blogosphere would quibble over whether the demise of this one or that one, was important. And, the assault goes on. The conservatives lost little time blaming the financial crisis on Fannie and Freddie; the Peterson anti-Social-Security people, are busy corrupting the nascent New Deal 2.0 organization.

Just to take one example, criticism of journalism profession and the news Media has been a staple theme of the liberal blogosphere, practically since the Daily Howler was still Al Gore’s roommate, but no one, yet, seems to have much of a clue about how to build an alternative institutional structure, which might inform American public opinion. (I guess we’re suppose to discover Al Jazeera and CurrentTV and Amy Goodman in the upper reaches of the cable dial, and leave it at that.) And, attempts to de-legitimize the establishment Media have been unavailing. Murdoch, even with more underwear showing that the last sagger on the street, is, it appears, confident enough to murder his accuser; many liberals still seem to think that the scandals are self-powered.

The central issue for Obama is the economy. (Yes, he is still black, and DADT is on its way to its funeral, but it is still the economy, stupid.) The economic program of the Bush-Bernanke years (which was the same program put into motion by Reagan and Greenspan, but with no more room to reduce nominal interest rates.) ran aground in 2008, but most “liberal” economists were “surprised”, and even many of those, who caught on late in the game (say, 2006 or 2007), had no critique or programme ready to offer as an alternative. In the event, even if they had read the Shock Doctrine and had a glimmer on the political tactics, the economics on the so-called Left was all preservationist reaction, backed by bafflement founded on unassailable ignorance.

I don’t really understand exactly why so many liberals want so much to “psychologize” Obama’s conduct in the Presidency, to try to figure out his personal outlook. (I know that’s no part of Newberry’s agenda.) What matters is what his legitimation and extension of the Bush policy agenda — in more operationally competent hands, which only makes it worse — is doing to the institutions of the political economy. He’s stabilizing an economy, which is going to grind into poverty and debt peonage a very large part of the American population, in a single generation.

He’s just legitimated a clear signal that the U.S. will default on its national debt within the foreseeable future! (I appreciate Stirling Newberry’s detailed explanation of how the debt ceiling is raised, but talk about burying the lead! That the U.S. is on a political path heading toward default is the significance of this partisan fight, which has left all policies for reviving and restructuring the failing U.S. economy off-the-table and out of the discussion. One of the two great political parties is now openly committed not just to public disinvestment and runaway deficit spending in service of eliminating the taxation of the rich; they also want to default.)

Worst President Ever?

Hoover, and maybe even Buchanan to some extent, I can excuse, partially, because the public mind may not have been entirely ready to accept what, in retrospect, we might think they should have done. Buchanan’s pettiness and corrupt conduct did a great deal to win the Presidency for Honest Abe Lincoln, and the politics of a Republican Party, which rejected radical abolition, but still held, as a matter of acknowledged moral principle, the wrong of slavery. Hoover’s abject failures paved the way for FDR’s greatness, by allowing FDR to resist his own cautious and conventional convictions on economics, and to allow others to initiate many projects, under the guise of experiment.

Here’s the thing, though: Lincoln rejected Buchanan’s policy; FDR rejected Hoover’s policy. They did so, because those policies had obviously failed in execution. Whether it was obvious in 1857 or 1929, that those policies would have to fail, . . . well, we could quibble there — such speculation is counterfactual, at best. But, Buchanan had failed and Hoover had failed. That’s factual.

And, George W. Bush had failed, too.

That’s the horror, which is Obama, and the horror, frankly, of majority support for Obama among Democrats to this day. Obama is Bush’s third term.