Best Modern President?

[Mr Khan]

Kasz216 said:

Rath said:

Kasz216 said:

Rath said:

I find it interesting that both the fiscally conservative and the liberals are fans of Clinton, I think its only social conservatives who don't like him.

Basically he was a charming liberal who ran a surplus and didn't fuck up with foreign policy.

 

Edit: Did Clinton run a surplus or just have a deficit smaller than growth of GDP? I can't remember.

He had a projected surplus that was never achiveved.

It's hard for anyone to complain about Clinton soley for the fact that he didn't have any problems to worry about.

It's kinda like how everyone loves Lincoln, Wilson and FDR even though they were extremely ghoulish presidents who were only excused for being a president during times of war.

Espiecally FDR.  He was just craaaazy.  Never was there a president who tried so hard to emasculate the other 2 branches of power.  He wanted to literally castrate every german male.  It took STALIN to be the voice of reason.

Lincoln kind of deserves it in my opinion. Well depending on your point of view on secession and civil rights anyway. Theres no denying he was a strong president who improved things for the blacks.

Also you have to ask, is not having anything to worry about the cause of Clintons good governance or the effect of it?

I'd say cause honestly... I mean, it's not like he stopped any external threats.  Every president but Obama had a huge external threat to worry about.

Also economically he came in right during the good part of the dot.com bubble.   He didn't have anything to do with the bubble and there was nothing that was going to prevent it's burst.

 

As for Lincoln.  He was important in providing black people with civil rights... while simaltaniously taking rights away from everybody else.   He illegally suspended haibus corpus and constantly imprisoned people for no reason and raided all media that disagreed with him.

Lincoln's main benefit was that the presidents around him were hisorically bad.  If he was put in a non-crisis presidency....

It's a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Hoover would have been a tremendous president if he and Coolidge had switched terms (plus then people would've gotten a better look at how truly lazy Coolidge was. The man slept 12 hours a day not including naps, which i didn't think was possible for a healthy adult. Imagine if he had been given a crisis of any sort), Hoover was good at promoting business, and would have done well at keeping the boom times rolling, but he had no feel at all for Depression.

But we can't afford those little what-ifs, can we? Judging presidents on their ideological merit is pointless at best, and revisionist at worst. We can only judge based on what they *did*