January 08, 2025
BIDEN RANKS AMONG WORST OF THE WORST PRESIDENTS
Just get back into office. That’s the line of demarcation between U.S. presidents who are abject failures and those who are passable but not irredeemable mediocrities. And it is an ironclad fact that one-termers are never deemed by history as “great” or even “above average” presidents.
The American electorate demands and expects their president to be serious, competent and somewhat likable – and definitely trustworthy. Think Joe Biden. On second thought, maybe don’t think about Joe Biden. Nobody else did during this recent election.
Add him to the one-termers such as Carter, Hoover, Harrison, Buchanan, Pierce, Van Buren, Bush I, Taft and Johnson. Some of them bailed rather than lose, as did Biden, but Biden-Harris would have lost to Trump as resoundingly as Harris-Walz. If you can’t measure-up in the first 4 years, then you don’t deserve a second chance. If an incumbent wins a second term, which is always a referendum on the first term, then he was not irrelevant. Think Obama. Think Clinton. Think W. Bush.
Historians can assess policy impact on economic and world affairs. They won’t view Biden kindly. Biden promised to be a unifying, transformational and/or transitional president. His policies were unfocused. His cognitive decline due to age was masked by family, staff, allies and the liberal news media from mid-2021 onward. His obsession was to undo whatever Trump did. There was minimal rational thought given to the consequences of an “Open Border” -- the cost and disposition of 10 million illegal migrants and the processing of 8 million pending asylum court cases – as well as electrical vehicle mandates, oil and natural gas drilling bans, DEI, the Ukraine War, ceasefire demands in Gaza, inflation-fueling spending, politicization of the DOJ and the FBI, the persecution of Trump, a $36 trillion national debt and a $2 trillion budget deficit.
Inflation consumer prices have increased 20 percent over 4 years. Inflation evolved from “transitory” to “coming down,” Biden said. That is true. Inflation hit 9 percent in 2022, but dipped to under 3 percent by 2024. But prices, once upped, never came back down to 2020 levels.
Biden entered office amid COVID-caused dysfunction and leaves amid Biden-caused dysfunction, the dissatisfaction with which caused “convicted felon” Trump’s compelling victory. How could a man of such inconsequence do so much harm in so little time? Perhaps it’s just benign neglect. He knows not what he does.
Biden will be remembered in history as a man who became a multi-millionaire on a senator’s salary over 36 years and VP for 8; a man who pardoned his troubled son, after promising not to; a man so delusional he thought he should be president until age 86; a man who let himself be dumped after winning enough delegates to be nominated; and a man who outlived his usefulness. That’s his sad legacy. So what else is there to do? Give out Medals of Freedom to Hillary Clinton, Bono, Jane Goodall, Magic Johnson, Michael J. Fox, Ralph Lauren, Denzel Washington, Anna Wintour AND George Soros.
JIMMY CARTER (1977-81): He lost to Ronald Reagan in a 1980 landslide. That rejection, for historians, says it all. He was a wealthy Georgia peanut farmer who, amid Nixon’s sordid Watergate scandal, was coming to Washington to teach y’all Yankees about honor and honesty. The establishment showed him the door after one term, highlighted by oil embargoes, gas lines, record inflation, 18-20 percent mortgage interest rates, and the 53 U.S. hostages held in Iran for over a year. The misguided Carter was a one-termer. But, compared to Biden, he looks almost awesome. BTW, that Ben Affleck-directed movie “Argo” about the hostage crisis was awesome too.
HERBERT HOOVER (1929-33): Wrong time, wrong place, wrong man, wrong mindset. Hoover was an engineer who believed in laissez faire economics, meaning do nothing and problems fix themselves. The 1920’s stock market boom was based on the fact that banks could invest depositors’ funds in stocks; that led to over-valuation and under-capitalization. Like 2007-08, the bubble burst, banks lost assets and went bankrupt, people had no cash, commercial activity halted, unemployment went from 3.2 to 25.9 percent in 1932, and Hoover lost.
Keynesian economics was soon invented: Flood the economy with government-borrowed money to keep consumers afloat, then businesses, which dampens unemployment. Hoover didn’t do that.
FRANKLIN PIERCE/JAMES BUCHANAN (1853-61): In antebellum America, the two decades before the Civil War, the Slaveholder South dominated the Democratic Party and held half of the Senate seats, which were 22 by 1850, the year of the Missouri compromise. But demography meant population growth in the West and that meant new (non-slave) states by the 1860s, ending that era.
Democrats clung to power by electing Doughfaces – Northern men with Southern sympathies – as president. Their job was to protect the “peculiar institution,” meaning slavery, which underpinned the South’s entire economy, built on harvesting cotton, tobacco and sugarcane, all labor-intensive. Pierce, a non-entity from NH, won in 1852. But in 1857, SCOTUS made the Dred Scott decision finding that slaves were property and must be returned-to-owner if they escaped to the North. In 1854, aspiring president Stephen Douglas authored the Kansas-Nebraska Act which allowed new states in the Nebraska territories to vote to be “Slave or Free.”
It was called “popular sovereignty” and prompted violence as “settlers” flocked to Kansas to vote. The pre-1850s notion of slavery was that it should be contained ONLY in the South. And that it would eventually die as new harvesting technologies surfaced. Douglas’s brainchild now meant it could go anywhere. Both Pierce’s presidency and the Whig Party collapsed and Democrats split.
Pious clergymen throughout the North (so-called “Abolitionists”) proclaimed slavery a sin and that it was “God’s work” to abolish it. They were suffused with self-righteous morality and devoid of economic comprehension. Slavery got them their cheap cotton, tobacco and sugar, even if it was morally wrong.
Pierce got dumped in 1856 and another Doughface, British ambassador Buchanan, was nominated and beat Republican John Fremont.
Southerners became more belligerent, more paranoid, more secessionist, and Buchanan more passive and befuddled…and got dumped in 1860. The House Divided crumbled. Lincoln (R) won with 39.7 percent against 2 Democrats (North/South) and an ex-Whig, a Civil War was inevitable, but the North fought to “preserve the Union,” not to “abolish slavery.”
ANDREW JOHNSON (1865-69): Maligned and hated even more than Trump, pro-Union (but not anti-slavery) Tennessee Democrat Johnson was Lincoln’s 1864 VP choice. Ford’s Theater changed that 2 months into Lincoln’s second term. Johnson understood that post-Civil War Reconstruction was all about power retention by Radical Republicans, which required abolishing slavery and, in 1868, impeaching him. They ran Washington. If the 11 Confederate states were re-admitted they might not – unless the freed slaves, who outnumbered Whites 2-1 to 3-1 in LA, AL, MS, GA, VA, NC and SC and were sizeable in TN, AR, TX – were allowed to vote.
Their expectation was that the Blacks would vote, and vote Republican, and elect 22 Southern senators and a bunch of congressmen forevermore. That initially required “occupying” the South with federal troops to prop-up carpetbagger governments who protected Black voters. That ended in 1876 when all troops were withdrawn. Thereafter the Southern Elite, the planter class that owned the land and long waged political battle with the poorer White farmers, racialized the situation from class conflict to racial conflict. It became White versus Black. And then came terrorism (KKK), poll taxes and literacy tests to suppress the Black vote to nothing.
The Radicals were so suffused with hatred of the Southern way-of-life that they ignored the economic reality that poor Whites had more in common with Blacks than the Elites. Republicans became extinct and segregationist White Democrats ruled for the next century.
Read more Analysis & Opinion from Russ Stewart at Russstewart.com
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