Quote of the day:

After eating an entire bull, a mountain lion felt so good he started roaring. He kept it up until a hunter came along and shot him… The moral: When you’re full of bull, keep your mouth shut.
—Will Rogers

Once again the Q&A at E-V.com provides some interesting material for me to re-use. You may recall that last year I did a survey of all the U.S. presidents and rated them as good, bad, or indifferent. Because I was trying to get it done before the presidential election, I rushed it a bit, and there are several presidents in the 20th century and later that I’d really like to spend more time with. For example, I still like Ike, but I recognize that he did more things that I don’t approve of than I had a chance to talk about. There are others where I don’t think I’d change my rating but I might want to give a more nuanced evaluation.

Maybe in a couple years I’ll do it again but without the deadline of an election.

Anyway, one of the questions in yesterday’s Q&A concerned ranking the single term presidents. In doing so, (Z) provided capsule summaries of his reasons, and in many cases he and I agree in our assessments, but in a few cases we don’t. Then again, I didn’t rank the presidents, I merely said yay or nay or meh.

D.D. in Portland, OR, asks: How would you rank the top U.S. Presidents who failed to get re-elected? I’m talking about true one-termers, so no James Garfield love-fest, please.

(Z) answers: We are going to presume that “one-termer” means anyone who served between 2.0001 and 4 years. Further, we will not make guesses about who might have run, or who secretly wanted to run but didn’t. We’ll just consider everyone who served between 2.0001 and 4 years and survived to the end of their time in office. From worst to best:

1. James Buchanan: One of the three worst presidents in American history; through his ineptness he took a situation where a civil war was likely and made it into a situation where it was an inevitability.
2. Andrew Johnson: Another of the three worst presidents in history. He was left to deal with the aftermath of the Civil War, and he screwed it up so badly he got impeached. America was not going to eliminate racism overnight, or even within the 19th century, but a better president certainly could have done better by the freedmen and freedwomen.
3. Franklin Pierce: He didn’t screw up quite as badly as Buchanan when it came to laying the groundwork for the Civil War, but he wasn’t far behind either. His mishandling of the mess in Kansas was particularly problematic, even if things there didn’t really explode until after he was out of office.
4. Martin Van Buren: He inherited the policies of Andrew Jackson, which laid the groundwork for a disastrous presidency. In particular, killing the Second Bank of the U.S. led to the worst depression in American history to that time, while Jackson’s Indian policy let to the Trail of Tears. Both of these things happened almost entirely on Van Buren’s watch.
5. John Tyler: He gets some credit for establishing that, when a vice president ascends to the presidency, that person has all the powers of the presidential office. But beyond that, he was a nonentity and a traitor.
6. Herbert Hoover: He would have been a good caretaker president, like Calvin Coolidge was before him. Unfortunately, the Great Depression was not a caretaker moment, and Hoover blew it badly, particularly with his handling of the Bonus Expeditionary Army.
7. Millard Fillmore: A nonentity, not particularly good or particularly bad.
8. Rutherford B. Hayes: Ibid.
9. Benjamin Harrison: Ibid. Feel free to put this trio in any order.
10. Chester A. Arthur: Getting the Pendleton Civil Service Act through Congress and signed into law is no small achievement, but that’s about it for him.
11. John Quincy Adams: A great secretary of state, and a great U.S. Representative, who happened to also serve as president. His time in the big chair was largely devoid of accomplishment, excepting a couple of treaties, and some progress on internal improvements, like the National Road.
12. William Howard Taft: He’s a little underrated, as he actually broke up a larger number of monopolies than “Trust Buster” Theodore Roosevelt did. That said, Taft did not like being president, he was outshone by TR on both sides of his term, and he became very passive during the latter part of his term.
13. George H.W. Bush: He brought a basically peaceful end to the Cold War, which was quite a feat, and he also successfully prosecuted the Persian Gulf War. He was done in by the economy, and by the corruption that had already begun to eat away at his political party.
14. Gerald Ford: The Nixon pardon did not work out well, that is for sure. And the economy took a nosedive while he was in the Oval Office, and he proved powerless to do much about it. However, he was a very decent man, and that is what America badly needed after the Nixon years.
15. John Adams: It is not easy to follow George Washington, and the Quasi-War with France was a mistake, particularly the Alien and Sedition Acts that were passed as a result. But Adams did receive power from one leader, and he handed it off to another leader (of a different political party) and so played a big role in establishing the stability of the new government. His domestic policies were also good, even if the foreign affairs stuff was poor.
16. Jimmy Carter: Because Ronald Reagan did such a great job of making Carter into a bugaboo, and because the Carter-era economy was generally bad, it has been taken as a given that Carter was a bad president. Not so fast. He inherited the bad economy, and actually managed to improve it some. He also had some major foreign-policy achievements, like the Camp David Accords. He greatly diversified the federal judiciary, and made the government, on the whole, more inclusive. Not bad for a white guy from the Deep South. He was also one of the two or three most decent men to be president.
17. Joe Biden: I suspect that when future scholars look at what Joe Biden did, with virtually no margin for error in Congress, they will roll their eyes and wonder what voters were thinking. Bonus points for being a man of principle who made some hard foreign-policy choices, like ending the drone attacks in Syria and withdrawing from Afghanistan.
18. James K. Polk: He’s always been the gold standard for one-term presidents. Though his agenda would not play well with modern voters, he ran on promises to acquire California, settle the border dispute with Britain/Canada in Oregon, and formalize Texas statehood. He did everything he promised, took virtually no vacation, went home to Tennessee when his time was up, and died shortly thereafter.

There were some other good Qs and As as well on subjects such ranging from Epstein to why Republicans are so susceptible to propaganda whereas Democrats are not. Read the whole thing here.

And now for something completely different.

Yesterday Paul Krugman published a conversation with Margaret Sullivan. As he wrote:

Margaret Sullivan has long been one of our best, clearest media critics. She’s probably best known for her stint as Public Editor — basically ombudsman — at the New York Times, a position the paper abolished. She has continued to keep a close eye on the media in an age of political intimidation, and this seemed like a good week to talk about where we stand.

You can read the transcript or watch the video here.