Mother Jones - Comments for "Favorite Presidents"

I think it's because the R's have been taken over by the far right fringe of the party. Country club republicans are considered watered down dems now. Too bad for them as they are quickly marginalizing themselves.

The Republican Party of the 1860s was the party of liberalism.

Today's GOP is the party of conservatism.

Institutions, unlike people, don't have essences. They change; sometimes they change into their opposite.

Southern conservatives remained Democrats for a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, because of their hatred of Abe Lincoln and what he represented.

When LBJ made the Democratic Party the party of civil rights, and Richard Nixon made the GOP the party of racial resentment, southern conservatives finally recognized that the GOP had ceased to be the party of liberalism--had ceased to be the party of Abe Lincoln.

And so virtually all conservative Democrats, over the past several decades, have become Republicans.

Abe Lincoln is a RINO. Which is why none of them voted for him.

The real reason they love Reagan is that the Republican presidents of the 20th Century - except for TR and Eisenhower - have all sucked, big time. Even Harding sucked less than Bush. In retrospect Reagan seems to have sucked less than Nixon and the Bushes, but that is only illusion. Ask any Nicaraguan.

The answer is very simple. Reagan is considered by Republicans to be the greatest president because he was the only one who was a hard core conservative.

And why haven't Republicans elected more authentic conservatives? Because only about %40 of the electorate is conservative. Authentic conservative presidential candidates get voted down, and ones who win are not really conservative, i.e. both Bushes.

Kevin, I'm rather surprised you didn't know all this.

Gene O'Grady: "Coolidge could read six languages, five of them foreign."

Big deal. I can read nine languages, though all of them are English.

As Sydney Carton alluded to, with Johnson, it's a "best of times, worst of times" situation. Civil rights on the one hand, "hey hey LBJ how many kids have you killed today" on the other.

All great Democratic presidents have such stains. Clinton, literally. FDR has Executive Order 9066. Wilson has "Birth of a Nation." If not for the good they did, any of those stains would be worthy of excommunication.

In essence, he's constantly named by conservatives because he's the only one they have who is not associated with failure, and even that required an expensive administrative effort in mythmaking.

Posted by: mbk114 on 01/05/09

The Reagan face on the Bush Republican party is described pretty clearly in this article:

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/010409.html

I think Republicans got sick of hearing Dems praying to St. John of Kennedy and decided they needed their own. I don't blame them for that, but neither Kennedy nor Reagan was even close to saintly and neither was all that great as a president. They had two very important qualities, if not three: good looks & affability, idealism of ideology and they were very popular. What more could today's Republicans need?

cmac,

You hit on a point that Kevin has made repeatedly over the past many years. Any Republican success has been at the price of dishonesty and deception, which may work in the short run but not the long run.

Republican ideas and goals, stated honestly, are unpopular, and for good reason. Hence Republicans essentially lie about them, funding think tanks and marketing people and focus-group testing their lies to see which will be swallowed.

The ultra-rich are called small businesses. Bill Gates is not an ultra-rich man, he is a small business with one employee-owner and extreme wealth. There are other examples of this all over the place.

In the long run lies simply don't work. This is extremely frustrating to those of us who recognize the lies in the short run though.

And the one they're enthusiastic about isn't any great prize, either.

I think the answer to your question is that Reagan was popular, and for all their talk about conservative 'values' (whatever those are), what they really want is just that: popularity. It's never gonna happen, of course, because in the end they're stuck in the meanness of their spirits and the narrowness of their vision. But Reagan managed to garner quite a bit of public approval, at least for a while, by posing as America's grampa. They don't seem to be aware that the shine eventually wore off.

Well, I don't think Republicans get much cred for thinking differently. So "Ronald Reagan" is the safe answer. It's like saying "buy IBM" used to be. Hiding with the crowd.

Consider it on a par with answering "Jesus" to "Who is your favorite philosopher?"

Frankly, I'd bet there are some of them that like Nixon better, they just have the sense not to say so.

As bad as Reagan was for most of us, and his legacy would've been a lot worse were it not for George Schultz and Howard Baker, he will be treated kindly by history and make the short list of most loved presidents. I say this with a lot of regret because he certainly wasn't my kind of leader. But, we don't have to leave the myth-making to the other side. If America has to have Reagan the myth, we should get some say in what he represents. "Ending the cold war", "reining in big government", "enabling an American economic renaisance" is clearly all BS. Throw that shit away. Sunny disposition is the only thing we can agree on and that should be the simple mythologized story of Reagan. We should always refer to him as Sunny Reagan.

Hat tip to Tom Marchioro for IMO a fair and accurate assessment of Jimmy Carter and the general crapulence of the mid/late 1970s.

Carter seems like a good man and he does not deserved to be remembered as History's Greatest Monster no matter what The Simpsons says. But does that mean he was a good President? Eh, not so much.

As for Reagan, don't make it so complicated - he and Ike are the only successful Republican presidents in living memory. And not too many people remember Ike.

Why not Lincoln? Because Lincoln has entered Secular Saint territory. Saying that Lincoln is your favorite President tells me nothing about your current political leanings. It's like saying "good things are good." True, and...?

Coolidge could read six languages, five of them foreign. Not somebody today's xenophobes and anti-intellectuals would have been comfortable with. Not to mention his career as a student radical protesting compulsory religious exercises.

SecularAnimist,

The election was stolen but Gore was also ahead of his time.

People were not ready for change at that time because people had not yet experienced any hardships. Sadly to say people are still not ready for change, not really, because they are still coasting along fairly well and any change will hurt. Sadly, people will only choose 'hurt' when the alternative is 'bigger hurt.'

I think history bears this out fairly well, and yes, it is annoying as hell.

We are gonna be annoyed by how little Obama seems to get done in the next couple years. Things have to get worse before they can get better.

People - watta ya gonna do?! Can't live with em, can't live without em.

My favorite Republican President is Teddy Roosevelt. But, I guess "progressive" and "Republican" were forever separated as a result of his legacy - the party of Lincoln no more!

I think it is more than that. Even if a modern Republican bothered to read a little history he would probably be turned off by TR because Teddy's party welcomed women, he set aside much Federal land as parks, and here is the big deal-breaker - he went after the corporate monopolies!

He was also big on competence and fairness and a strong US.

So far it sounds like aside from the "strong US" point Teddy was for everything the modern Republican is against.

The modern Republican party is like a loser alky who doesn't want to hear about his successful Gramps cause it makes him feel guilty and worthless.

My favorite president of my lifetime is Al Gore, who was the legitimately elected President of the United States in 2000.

Unfortunately he was prevented from taking office by a bloodless coup engineered by a cabal of career white collar crooks who attempted to steal the election with massive voter disenfranchisement and fraud, and then when that failed, turned to a bunch of corrupt, partisan Republican hacks on the Supreme Court who egregiously and sneeringly violated their oaths of office to put their hand-picked stooge in the White House.

I believe that at the dawn of the 21st century, Al Gore was -- and still is -- the single person most qualified to serve as President of the USA.

With his ongoing work to educate and advocate around the need to deal with anthropogenic global warming by making a rapid transition to a post-carbon, sustainable energy economy based on harvesting limitless, abundant, free wind and solar energy, Al Gore is in my view stepping up to a challenge greater than anything that confronted any other president in US history. Indeed, the best thing that President Obama could do with regard to the closely interconnected issues of climate/environment, energy and economy would be to implement the ten-year plan that Gore's organization has put forward.

The blatant theft of the 2000 election was a tragedy for all of humanity, not only because it foisted the corrupt and criminal Cheney-Bush regime upon the world, but because it denied the world the vision and leadership of Al Gore at such a crucial time. Literally hundreds of millions of human lives, and much of the Earth's rich, diverse biosphere, will almost certainly be lost in coming decades as a direct result of that heinous crime.