Top 10 Presidents All-Time

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:

1. Abraham Lincoln – There can be no other. He led us through our worst crisis, he dominated the 19^th 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.

Franklin Roosevelt – The Lincoln of the 20^th century. He created the government we have today. He led us, not through the crisis we thought we were facing in the Depression, but the far more existential crisis we were in fact facing with World War II. He saved democracy, he saved capitalism. He feared our seeing him as crippled but it’s his wheelchair that now stands out in memory, his ability to absorb pain and deliver inspiration from it.

George Washington – The Lincoln of the 18^th century. He created our democracy, by stepping away from power not once, but twice. He understood the power of symbols, and his own place in history, as no one else. Washington created the government we live under, supported Hamilton’s efforts to create a modern economy over Jefferson’s ideal plane, and yet synthesized both into the American “ideology” of capitalism and representative government.

Barack Obama – History will record this President as the most important in this century. He promised change and delivered, despite the greatest crisis since the Depression, despite an opposition as stiff as the Confederacy. Health care, gay rights, a negotiated foreign policy, and prosperity are just part of his legacy. His speeches will be quoted by your grandchildren the way Lincoln’s were in my time. No other country could have produced such a man, and he used that symbolism to open doors for billions.

Theodore Roosevelt – He validated the McKinley Thesis of gradual change, and exceeded it. His imperialism sets him back in history’s eyes, but he also created our National Park system and our first true regulatory regime. He redefined the office for the 20^th century. He put Washington ahead of New York for the first time. He was heroic all his life, and without him Franklin Roosevelt would never have existed, politically.

Thomas Jefferson – The author of our founding document (defined as such by Lincoln) created modern politics, doubled the size of the country, and defined the contradictions that remain central to America, namely the distance between our ideals and our actions. He won our first foreign war, turned America’s face toward the Pacific, and created the American ideal of the scholar as leader.

Richard Nixon – I hate to write this, but the second half of the 20^th century was defined by him. He created our environmental agencies, he opened up China, and while his excesses destroyed him, that destruction boundaries future Presidents must honor. He created the modern dollar, ended the nation’s second Civil War, and was in many ways the most liberal President ever, even while speaking for, and ushering in, a conservative era.

James K. Polk – As with Nixon, hate to write it. But he doubled the size of the nation, compromising with England to fix our northern border and invading Mexico to secure our southern border. Imagine what our time might be had a Mexican California found, and secured, that state’s gold. Or had it found, and secured, Texas’ oil. He gave America the territory and resources needed to make it a world power, and that’s not nothing.

Woodrow Wilson – Like Nixon, a great tragic hero. A moralist, creator of the Federal Reserve, he made the Democratic Party relevant again. He held us out of War until we could win it rather than be ground up by it. He failed at securing a just peace, but his foreign policy ideals drive us on to this day.

Ronald Reagan – I’m a Democrat, but give Reagan his due. He made his life a symbol of what the modern Republican Party tries to be. He made manifest the conservative legacy Nixon left unfinished. He remains America’s ideological touchstone. His place in this list may fall, as the cost of his Afghanistan policy, his tax cut policies, and his ideological Supreme Court appointments add up, but for now he stands above the rest.