With the next Presidential race starting to heat up, and with my spring vacation now underway, I decided it would be fun to write about the best Presidents and (next week) the worst ones, from the perspective of my own view on history.
I see generational patterns repeating, each generation driven by a different industry, and each sparked by a crisis that threatens the very foundations of our democracy. The best Presidents have been those who looked crises in the eye, and overcame them, creating political assumptions that lasted for a generation. The worst have generally been those who led us into these crises.
Enjoy the list, please feel free to post your disagreements. Let’s have some fun with this:
- Abraham Lincoln – There can be no other. He led us through our worst crisis, he dominated the 19th century as no other figure. Lincoln was also the best writer ever in the White House. Even without a war he would have been a giant. The Homestead Act. The Intercontinental Railway. Land grand colleges. He opened the West. Without Lincoln our continent would be like South America, a collection of squabbling, minor powers, without a central government and ennobling ideals strong enough to prevent dictators from seizing, and keeping power.
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