Barack Obama: Second-Best Democratic President Ever?

I just read Jonathan Chait's excellent piece about liberal inability to feel satisfaction with Democratic Presidents. To a certain extent I think this feeling is understandable: American politics has never come particularly close to producing results that are good enough, and we shouldn't shut up about, or try to forget, this fact. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't recognize and appreciate those people who make American politics get a whole damn lot closer to good enough. So, in that spirit, let me present a list of names: James Buchanan, Jimmy Carter, Grover Cleveland, Bill Clinton, Andrew Jackson, Andrew Johnson, Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Barack Obama, Franklin Pierce, James Polk, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Tyler, Martin Van Buren, and Woodrow Wilson. That's all the Democrats who have been President (counting Jefferson and cohort as members of a different party). Which of them had a greater Presidency than Barack Obama's had so far? Note that by "had a greater Presidency" I mean "did more good things, as a net matter, during their Presidency." We might like Carter's post-Presidential self, or the memory of JFK, better than we like Obama, but that doesn't count. Who was a better liberal President than Obama?


Obviously the first answer is that FDR was a better liberal President than Obama. Perhaps, as Chait's piece notes, he was cautious and compromising in much the way Obama was, and actually suffered from many of the same flaws as Obama. But I don't think I'd get much disagreement on the claim that Roosevelt was the greatest liberal Democratic President in American history.

But who else places ahead of Obama? Certainly Lyndon Johnson's domestic achievements outpace Obama's, but whereas Obama's foreign policy has been a smashing success for anyone who isn't just plain a pacifist, LBJ, well, uh, I think we know what his foreign-policy was like. (I've been listening to a great Tom Paxton song, later repurposed as a critique of G.W. Bush, about LBJ and Vietnam.) Overall Obama wins, though personally I think LBJ deserves more credit for domestic achievements and less blame for Vietnam than he gets (Kennedy deserving more of that blame).

As mentioned above, though we might like Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton quite a lot in their post-Presidential manifestations, it's just hard to argue with a straight face that their Presidencies were greater, from a liberal perspective, than Obama's. Likewise, though we might well like John F. Kennedy as a person, a memory, and an icon, his Presidency was just unimpressive. Most of his domestic policies were never realized until Johnson pushed them through, he was constantly a disappointment on civil rights, and remember that bit above about his deserving more blame for Vietnam? Truman's "fair deal" passed approximately zero percent of the way through Congress, and I'm not terribly a fan of his foreign policy.

That brings us back to the pre-Roosevelt Democrats, though we needn't spend much time on them. Jackson was awful. Van Buren was a lousy President, though his post-Presidential service in Congress as an opponent of slavery is much appreciated. John Tyler, James Buchanan, Franklin Pierce, and Andrew Johnson were just repellant, though much more trivial than the larger-than-life Jackson. Polk may have been an effective President, but he sure wasn't a particularly left-wing one. Grover Cleveland represented the conservative wing of the Democratic Party.

That just leaves Woodrow Wilson. He was an enormous disappointment on civil rights, mainly because he was quite the racist. His domestic accomplishments, while easily more impressive than any prior Democratic President, was, I believe, rather modest compared to those of FDR, LBJ, or Obama. Winning World War I admittedly deserves some credit, though I know William Jennings Bryan hated the way Wilson dragged us into that war, and if we're evaluating on the grounds of raw accomplishment then Wilson gets demerits for his failure on the League of Nations.

The conclusion seems inevitable: so far, Barack Obama appears to have the second-greatest set of net accomplishments of any liberal Democratic President. The health-care law alone places him in the company of Roosevelt and Johnson, a host of other 111th-Congress achievements would look impressive for most other Presidents, he succeeded in stabilizing the worst economic crisis since, you know, Roosevelt's time, and his foreign-policy has been about as good as is possible without having a World War to fight and win. It is true that he probably made somewhat sub-optimal use of the vast Democratic majorities in the previous Congress, and that public policy has been getting worse since John Boehner's hand closed around the gavel. (Although note that the supercommittee will fail, and the trigger attached to such failure might be negated, which would vastly reduce the total spending cuts from the debt ceiling debacle.) But, as Chait mentions, one can bring a similar litany of complaints against literally any other person who's ever been President. Maybe we'd like it if Obama had managed to push the envelope of how good the political system can be, but if we evaluate him in the context of how bad that system has historically been, he comes out looking pretty damn good.


As an aside, if I were casting an alternate-vote ballot for all-time Democratic nominee, I think it would look something like this:

1. Franklin Roosevelt
2. John Kennedy
3. Barack Obama
4. Lyndon Johnson
5. Bill Clinton
6. Jimmy Carter
7. Woodrow Wilson
8. Harry Truman
9. Grover Cleveland

A big part of why Kennedy's Presidency wasn't that great is that he was shot one-third of the way through it. If he had lived, it's very likely he would've won re-election in 1964, and it's also quite likely he would've enacted vast swaths of what was ultimately the LBJ agenda. I'm basically giving him credit for that on my ballot, and also giving him a wee bit of benefit-of-the-doubt about handling Vietnam better than Johnson would've.