Who is the worst president in history?

Ok, Ok...I'll play along.

Ulysses S. Grant: great General, bad president. Rampant corruption in his adminstration...ushered in the first whispers of the Gilded Age and took the teeth out of Reconstruction, setting it up for it's ultimate demise in the Tilden-Hayes Compromise.

But I am serious about looking back in 20 years. Hell, I'd take a hard look at Jimmy Carter's term right now too.

 

I think Carter will be in the discussion a decade or two after he dies. His poor management of the economy is strike one, and we're just now seeing the effects of his Middle East policy.
Buchanan is a good vote, but the seeds of the Civil War were planted long before he took office (see Kansas and Nebraska in the 1850s). Maybe his poor leadership hastened its coming, but it was probably just a matter of time before the war happened.
Hoover is a good choice. Self-reliance is a wonderful concept, except when half your country is out of work and starving to death.
I'll also throw in a vote for Andrew Johnson. He was a petty man who couldn't get over personal insults enough to allow the country to heal. His reconstruction policies shaped the culture of the South for the next 140 years. He was also the first president impeached, and probably the only one to have been impeached for a good reason.

 

Those of you vowing to check back in 20 years will, I think, be chastened to realize how foolish your perceptions were in 2008. Same thing happened to me with Reagan.

Carter would get my vote – and did, in 1976. I got smarter, later.

Harding, while a fraternity brother of mine, did a poor job as well.

Grant won the war, so he gets a pass.

And yeah, lying under oath is a terrible reason to get into trouble. You try it sometime and see where it gets you.

 

Johnson gets my vote for essentially sabotaging Reconstruction.

 

Excellent analysis, Batman.

(not necessarily to be read while imagining Robin's voice)

 

Johnson was hamstrung by rules which wouldn't let him ditch Lincoln's cabinet...
we're seeing three -- Carter, Bush and Nixon, in no order

 

Grant may have won the war, but he couldn't have done it without a brilliant civil-military dynamic with Lincoln, or a hellcat of a merciless bastard in WT Sherman.

 

Yeah, Grant won the war, but he had no idea how to run a country.

 

why in the heck did LBJ not make that list?

 

For all of LBJ's failures, his signing of the Civil Rights Act keeps him away from the worst.

 

You have to ask?

 

and a lotta middle- to lower-class parents with dead solider sons from the '60s will argue that point.