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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
Thank you both. It’s now queued up as my next audible read.
It’s not, by any stretch, an undifferentiated admiration. I share what I presume is your discomfort with both of the factors cited above. I find it difficult, however, not to be taken in by TR the romantic and TR the adventurer, even though there are aspects of both that bled into near-psychosis.
Was TR a great man? I don’t think I’d go that far. I do think, however, that he was a great character.
Manny, yes! GWB will recover in time, rather like (though not to the same extent as) Truman. Overthrowing vicious dictators always looks good in the history books. Also, his reputation can only go in one direction and that’s up.
In my previously noted quest to read biographies of every dead president, I have learnt that *every* president is under-rated. Extraordinary how that happens. If I ever find a biography of James Buchanan, I promise to report back.