Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Who’s Your Favorite Underrated President?
Since we’re all playing along with the consensual fiction that this is Presidents’ Day, a question for the assembled Ricochetti: Who’s your favorite underrated American president? Calvin Coolidge is an easy answer around these parts — Ricochet operates under the banner of Silent Cal Productions, after all — but we’ll take him as a given. My choice? Grover Cleveland, the man George Will once referred to as “the last Democratic president with proper understanding of [the presidency’s] place in our constitutional order.” Writing in the Boston Globe, the consistently great Jeff Jacoby gets at why:
He was never paralyzed by the fear of saying “no.” In his first term alone, Cleveland vetoed 414 bills, more than double the total of all the presidents who preceded him. Over his eight years in the White House, Cleveland rejected an astonishing 584 bills passed by Congress. That many of those measures were popular feel-good measures, such as authorizations for specious veterans’ pensions, makes Cleveland’s fortitude all the more impressive. Only 1 percent of his vetoes were overridden — a testament to the power of ethical principle to withstand the political appetite for spending other people’s money.
Read the whole Jacoby piece for a sense of the thoroughgoing integrity that was the hallmark of Cleveland’s entire career. Then marvel at the chasm between him and the next Democrat to assume the White House, Woodrow Wilson.
OK, Ricochet, how about you?
Published in General
Since I’m the first one to comment on this post, I get to nominate Calvin Coolidge.Warren G. Harding.I like Ike! Debatable if he was a great president, but James K. Polk had about as big an impact as any other president.
BTW, I’m fond of saying, “Just because I think the last good Democrat to occupy the White House was Grover Cleveland, doesn’t mean I’m extreme!”
President George H. W. Bush.
Well, not sure he’s underrated, but there’s always Jackson. Sure made an impression on the nation. His follow-on, Matty Van Buren also did great things, albeit some were during Jackson’s presidency.
Then there’s Chester A. Arthur. Once a hog-swilling politico at the public trough from the Port of New York, he managed to become president with the assassination of Garfield, and while very little was expected of him, he managed to do some real good in his one term. He instituted the Civil Service System, reforming the huge federal patronage system. He ought to be commended, if for nothing else, because he vetoed something like 510 bills. That is a vastly larger number than anyone before. He killed a lot of pork bills (?you mean we had pork then – I thought everything in OLD America was perfect.)
Polk is definitely under-rated. Say what you will about his methods, he left the country much greater than he found it, and in only one term.
Polk’s advice for Obama:
This may shock my fellow Ricochetti. My favorite underrated President is . . . FDR, in the sense that he is underrated among conservatives.
Don’t get me wrong, he absolutely sucked on the domestic front, but . . .
When it came to WW2, I think he handled things brilliantly. Even as a flaming liberal, he recognized and acted against threats to the free world – something Obama is unwilling to do against Muslim terrorists. Seen any beheadings in the news lately? What’s Obama going to do about these folks?
More speculation than fact, but based on what I’ve read James Garfield would likely have been an excellent president, but for his assassination.
I too like Ike.
I agree with very little of the man’s policies (WIP inflation, come on!)……but how about Gerald Ford just because I can think of few presidents who, outside of those who got an international crisis or Lincoln, who got worse, inherited a worse set of cards
My favorite underrated President is Dave. He tapped into his small-business acumen to sort out the budget mess and proved that an ordinary citizen with common sense beats a career politician any day.
Hey since we’re all celebrating a fictional holiday today, I figure fictional Presidents should be included in the list.
I think that every President should follow the example of William Henry Harrison: Catch pneumonia on Inauguration Day, die after a month without doing anything.
I also think every President should follow the example of James Madison and let Washington DC get burned to the ground.
Combining those two, I think, would produce a near perfect presidency.
Polk promised a very small number of things as a candidate, achieved them in one term, and declined to run for re-election. I’m not a fan of his program, but I admire his approach to office. (And as billy notes, his work ethic was spectacular, even if he did die of a heart attack shortly after leaving office.)
Up until David McCullough’s magnificent biography, I would have said John Adams.
I see your point, but no: his evaluation of Uncle Joe Stalin was even more delusional than his understanding of of economics. It was creepy.
Mentioned a few times already, I’ll share my choice in the form of a song:
Polk ran on re-establishing the independent treasury, 54’40” or Fight, and taking California and New Mexico (including Arizona). Done, done and done; all in one term. He rejected calls for re-election since he accomplished everything he promised in his first term.
Polk died within a year (2 or 3 months I think) after he left office. Maybe he should have taken a day off or 2.
Jon, since I can’t resist the urge to be pedantic, technically Polk fell short of his 54’40” promise. The northern border of Washington is the 49th parallel, 54’40” would have given us most of British Columbia as well.
I would put Truman in the category, not FDR. If Truman were alive today and running for president we would all be happy to vote for him as a conservative. He would be as conservative as you can get as any former or current Republican Governor who might be running in 2016.
Truman is my vote as well. The job was thrust on him with FDR’s passing, and he was handed a nettle of problems, including the end of WW2 and the start of the Cold War against Stalin.
Slight problem with that:
Still happy to vote for him as a conservative?
Serves me right for falling asleep in history class. Thanks for the correction!
No doubt Truman was a socialist on the domestic front.
I do think he deserves credit from hawks because he didn’t flinch at dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in order to save American lives, supported the Marshall Plan and displayed considerable courage in firing MacArthur who acted like a jack*** in the end.
Also put his neck out and bravely supported the creation of Israel. Not a very popular position to take at the time.
I think the mistake many are making is to assume conservative=hawk and socialist=dove.
For most of the 20th century the Democrats were socialists on the domestic front and Wilsonian hawkish interventionists on foreign policy, while the Republicans tended towards isolationism. Kennedy was a staunch Cold Warrior, and his and LBJ’s administrations were responsible for escalation in Vietnam. It wasn’t until McGovern that the party embraced “Give Peace a Chance” as a foreign policy ideology.
And even as recently as the 90’s Clinton intervened in Bosnian over the fierce objections of many conservatives and established “regime change” as official U.S. policy towards Iraq. In 2000 W. campaigned as a non-interventionist before 9/11 convinced him (and me) of the need for a more hawkish foreign policy.
Absolutely, Harding. History is usually written by Libs and that is one reason why Harding is so disparaged. He rode out the worst recession in U.S. history prior to the Great Depression. He took the advice of Andrew Mellon to do nothing and the economy snapped back, setting up the Roaring ’20’s. Harding was the first president to address a black audience on civil rights. He was the first to introduce anti-lynching legislation, shot down by the Dems. He instituted a modest tariff structure which helped promote industry during the 1920’s. For better or worse, he established the Bureau of the Budget. He damped down the Red Scare started by the Dems during WWI. He was much criticized for his sexual pecidalloes. But we are more enlightened in our time. We have been instructed to ignore sex and the president because “everybody does it.”
Couldn’t agree more but I think you’re jumping to conclusions I didn’t make. JFK’s hawkish tendencies were perhaps overshadowed by his utter lack of experience in the global arena; it also didn’t help that he appointed an automobile executive as Defense Secretary.
As an aside, JFK is actually one of my fiscal heroes because the first thing he did in office was to push for the abolition of the 90% income tax bracket.
Eisenhower does not get the credit for his stand on enforcing the Little Rock School desegregation order. Sending in the 101st Airborne was a clear sign the might of the Federal Government was going to support the Federal Courts in desegregation of schools.
Sorry, that comment wasn’t specifically directed at you. I had in mind the prior comments that suggested FDR’s hawkishness was surprising given the New Deal or that Truman was a conservative we’d be happy to vote for based entirely on his foreign policy.
I thank Devereaux for nominating, ahem… me.
As Jackson’s most trusted advisor, I made his presidency much better by encouraging his best instincts (small government, low taxes, no internal improvements, no central banking) and suppressing his worst (making war, which he likely would have done several times were I not there).
Then, as presdident myself, I maintained the small government, low tax, anti central banking stance in the face of a recession resulting from profligate state spending on canals and the related out of control state banks. Heavy spending was recommend by all my political friends to counter the downturn but really to boost sagging popularity. But I held the non-interventionist course. Of course I did. I was author of what some have called the best and most perceptive statement on economics ever written by a president – and it was all about keeping government out of the economy. Then, when I had a chance to guarantee a second term for myself by going to war with England over some border issues with Canada, I instead defused the tensions. (My good friend and former prez, on the other hand, was ready to come out of retirement to lead the army north).
A coupla little factoids. I was the first president actually born in the United States, and I am still the only president whose first language was not English.
Other than myself? Cleveland’s first term (but not so much when he came back later for a second). Chester Arthur. William Harding.
+1for Harding.