I read Joe Biden's outstanding op-ed in the Wall Street Journal today, and started reading the responses to it at DKos and elsewhere.
Among the minor criticisms leveled at Joe's column in the comments were some remarks that Biden came close to idealizing the foreign policies of George H.W. Bush and Ronald Reagan when he said:
In fact, it is the policies that President George W. Bush has pursued, and that John McCain would continue, that are divorced from that great tradition – and from the legacy of Republican presidents like Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush.
And while I sympathize with the idea that Bush Pere and Reagan have much to answer for, I am reminded of a mental exercise I tried not too long ago that made me shudder.
I posed myself the question: who were the best three presidents of my lifetime? I don't count JFK because he was assassinated two months after I was born. I'll save you the math. That makes me 44 until September.
So right to the bottom of the list goes Dubya, followed by Nixon. And then Johnson because he allowed Vietnam to escalate and his party to splinter irreparably for a generation.
So who was I left with? Well, Clinton of course topped the list, but to fill the next two spots, I had to choose from among Carter, Ford, Reagan and Bush I.
Well, I could hardly put Reagan in the top three. He got us into the longest and deepest recession since the Depression with his dopey tax cuts, enabled the religious right, killed student loans while I was a student, squandered the environment . . . I could go on, but you get the point. So he automatically drops to No. 5.
Carter, I really struggled with. Yes, there was Salt II and yes, there were the Camp David Accords, and he was certainly the most honest man to live in the White House in my generation. Based on what he stood for, he was one of the great ones, but on what he actually accomplished? The squandered opportunities under Carter far outnumbered the seized ones. The Iranian hostage situation was poorly handled, as was foolhardy rescue attempt. And are we really nostalgic for the days of double-digit inflation? Look at the next three Democrats who preceded him: JFK, Truman, FDR, and the one that followed, Clinton. All brought prosperity and prowess to America, and improved the domestic metrics. Carter was far better outside the White House than in it. Could I really make him No. 3?
And so here I am, looking at this pathetic list of presidents who have served in my lifetime, and I'm looking at George H.W. Bush and Gerald Ford as the second- and third-best? Very quickly, I move Carter up into third ahead of Bush -- because no way is the enabler of Iran-Contra going to make the top three, even if he did make all the right moves in the Persian Gulf War.
And to be honest, I can't complain about making Ford No. 2. I think he did the best he could with the rotten hand he was dealt. Let's remember, he was only made vice president as impeachment insurance for Nixon because Tricky Dick's advisers believed no one would remove Nixon from the White House to place Ford in it. And in retrospect, the Nixon pardon worked out to be the right thing to do because it allowed the country to fire its last emotional shot in anger (at Ford, who metaphorically took one for the team) and move on from Watergate. He only served two years, wasn't elected, didn't win re-election. But he didn't really screw much up either, the quintessential Caretaker Presidency.
Considering how royally some attempts at a Transformative Presidency have screwed things up, I guess we should be grateful for mediocrity. For that, I will forgive Biden a little nostalgia for Bush I and Reagan, who, given what a bad string we've had in the past half-century, were merely mid-pack.