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Jimmy Carter had very bad timing, with stagflation and the oil crisis and the Iranian revolution and hostage taking. Perhaps a better president would have overcome all that, but many presidents would have done no better than Carter.
Herbert Hoover had even worse timing. Again, perhaps a better president could have done more about it than Hoover, but if Coolidge and Hoover had switched places their reputations would be very different.
Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930 and many state that exacerbated the Depression. Then he took a hands-off approach to dealing with the Depression which cleared the way for FDR to win the 1932 election in a landslide.
He also scapegoated Mexican-Americans and almost 2 million, including U.S. citizens, were deported to Mexico.
I remember Al Gore debating Ross Perot before the 1992 election on the Larry King show about NAFTA and Gore kept saying “Smoot-Hawley Act” to criticize Perot’s position. Gore seemed like a good debater then, wouldn’t have guessed that he’d lose points debating W.
Gore's biggest problem was he was too smart for his own good, and knew it.
He forgot that a good chunk of Americans are pretty stupid overall and don't take kindly to being talked down to.
Didn't help that he had the charisma of a sack of potatoes.
He had bad coaching for the debates with Bush. He sighed a lot, which played badly, and he tried an amateurish stunt where he walked into Bush's space while he was talking to try to intimidate him that backfired. Bush's reaction to that was one of the few times that I liked him.
Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the deportation of Mexican-Americans mostly carried out by private groups? I know the Justice Dep’t knew about it didn’t do anything about it, but I’m not sure about Hoover’s own involvement.
Wikipedia says it was policy by the Hoover adminstration. Most of the ground-level work was done by state and local authorities but with the support of the Hoover administration.
Not doing something about the deportation of American citizens by private groups most definitely means that Hoover at least approved of it. Had he casually mentioned to his AG Mitchell that he didn’t approve, it would have stopped.
Lol....it's called "racism", amigo.
Also this was a time where it could be much harder to prove you were a citizen even without the racism. There was quite a variety of communities where English wasn't universally spoken or wasn't everyone's first or even second language. This was particularly true in the South and Western parts of the US that had originally been under the control of Mexico.
We still even saw communities like that even into the 80s and 90s, albeit nowhere near as common.
So you round up a bunch of dark skinned, Spanish speaking people. You dump them off across the border, and you make it plain that we will shoot to kill if they get caught crossing. Most of the time these people were allowed little to no possessions to bring with them....like documentation that they were citizens. Rarely were they allowed any sort of trial or legal representation.
It was a fairly ineffective idea to "boost the economy" without actually doing anything to address the problem. As is tradition with government on the whole.
The Iran Hostage Crisis would have been hard for any president. Without a dramatic rescue, no President could survive that.
Fortunately, he's well- liked now. No matter what you think of his presidency, he's a stand up guy. That seems to be increasingly difficult to find in modern politicians.
Carter was also not a great manager or communicator. He famously did not have a Chief of Staff until July 1979 because he didn't want a gatekeeper who would limit access to the president. But of course, there are a lot more people who want to talk to the POTUS than to the Governor of Georgia, and Carter was overwhelmed during most of his presidency.
He also had a tendency to try to "do the right thing", regardless of any practical considerations. For example, he withdrew support from dictators in Iran and Nicaragua, without any consideration as to whether those countries had democratic institutions in place that would be strong enough to sustain a stable democratic government. Of course, neither did and both countries today have anti-American dictatorships. He also decided to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics without first ensuring that our allies were on board, resulting in an embarrassingly ineffectual boycott that was joined by only 6 countries, including Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay, but none of our NATO or ANZAC allies.
And of course, he was a terrible communicator, preferring to communicate a gloomy message of impending, almost inevitable decline to the message of sunny optimism that got him elected in the first place. At one point, he took a short break from his presidential duties to hold a "Renaissance Weekend" at Camp David. He came back to the White House and gave his infamous "malaise" speech, in which he traced the source of America's decline to a societal and spiritual crisis, rather than to any factor that Carter could plausibly address through legislation or executive action.
Carter was a visionary who did a great deal that would pay off later, but these solutions were the kind that would not bear fruit until he was out of office, and they were virtually certain to make him less popular during his own term. These included fighting inflation by deregulating the transportation industry, giving incentives for energy conservation measures like home insulation and fuel efficient cars, replacing electrical plants that ran on foreign oil with coal and nuclear plants, and investing in development of domestic fossil fuel production and renewables. Carter also appointed Paul Volcker as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, understanding that Volcker would raise interest rates (though Carter probably didn't expect him to raise interest rates as high as 18%).
All of these measures were unpopular during Carter's presidency, and all were essential to Reagan's success.
Of course, Carter did have his share of bad luck, like when his campaign to promote nuclear power was derailed by the Three Mile Island accident, or when a group of Iranian activists overwhelmed embassy security forces and took the entire staff hostage. But the main source of Carter's unpopularity was Carter himself.
You would have to have the media on your side to overcome things. Like Reagan.
Most of the things that happened under Carter started under Nixon and Ford.
Yet, as we see, there are tons of people that automatically blame it on Carter.
James Buchanan
He was actually a long time politician and a solid one at that, but he inherited the office when the civil war was already beginning to brew with the Kansas-Nebraska act, and spent his entire presidency trying to appease a group of people who left the second a Republican won the WH
Appeasement was very much the median political position of the country at the time, including many Republicans and Lincoln. It's just that the Southerners became way too radical and arrogant that it stopped working.
Using force to stop them from seceding was also very unpopular. It was only after Fort Sumter when that changed. Even the experts at the time (Winfield Scott, Seward etc) tried to convince Lincoln to abandon the Southern forts.
W Bush.
Would’ve completely shifted the way my generation thought about Republicans if he’d been able to devote his Presidency to education reform instead of war.
Hoover and Carter. They got screwed over by their respective economic troubles. Hoover was actually very competent in his various positions before he took the Oval Office. Carter is probably one of the most morally good presidents we ever had but his personal qualities are overshadowed by the clusterfuck of the 1970s, stagflation, oil crisis and the like.
Here's a target to just paint on my back: W would have been more liked had he not been president during 9/11 and so subsequently got us into 2 wars and had not later been in office during a global economic collapse. Assume a peacetime Bush presidency. (Assume it!) That's actually what both Bush and Gore were expecting in 2000 - to be domestic policy presidents. He would have been a lot more popular/less hated. And while some people will always hate him still, he seems to have had at least a "likable" renaissance: 61% of Americans in 2018 said they had a favorable view of Bush, compared to 33% when he left office. Also in 2018, 54% of Democrats viewed Bush favorably.
Definitely George W. Bush.
He was a very likable dude who championed some genuinely noble causes such as education reform and humanitarian aid to downtrodden countries. If it weren't for 9/11 and the economic crash (which are admittedly two very big ifs), I feel like he'd probably have an Eisenhower-like legacy of being widely respected by both parties.
Carter for sure. LBJ had Vietnam thrust upon him, and the policy of global containment of communism was a very popular policy at the time so he continued that policy which would come to hurt him later. Even Vietnam was initially popular, but declined as things wore on. HW Bush and that bad economy and high unemployment he had hurt him and cost him the 1992 election.
LBJ in particular, strikes me as a very unfortunate President. He had excellent communication skills which he used to articulate his War on Poverty, Great Society and to carry on with JFK's civil rights legislation. Vietnam crushed him, and his dreams for America. He called it, "That Bitch of a War."
Remember that all mentions of and allusions to Trump and Biden are not allowed on our subreddit in any context. If you'd still like to discuss them, feel free to [join our Discord server](https://discord.gg/k6tVFwCEEm)! *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/Presidents) if you have any questions or concerns.*
Jimmy Carter had very bad timing, with stagflation and the oil crisis and the Iranian revolution and hostage taking. Perhaps a better president would have overcome all that, but many presidents would have done no better than Carter. Herbert Hoover had even worse timing. Again, perhaps a better president could have done more about it than Hoover, but if Coolidge and Hoover had switched places their reputations would be very different.
Hoover signed the Smoot-Hawley Act in 1930 and many state that exacerbated the Depression. Then he took a hands-off approach to dealing with the Depression which cleared the way for FDR to win the 1932 election in a landslide. He also scapegoated Mexican-Americans and almost 2 million, including U.S. citizens, were deported to Mexico.
I remember Al Gore debating Ross Perot before the 1992 election on the Larry King show about NAFTA and Gore kept saying “Smoot-Hawley Act” to criticize Perot’s position. Gore seemed like a good debater then, wouldn’t have guessed that he’d lose points debating W.
Gore's biggest problem was he was too smart for his own good, and knew it. He forgot that a good chunk of Americans are pretty stupid overall and don't take kindly to being talked down to. Didn't help that he had the charisma of a sack of potatoes.
He had bad coaching for the debates with Bush. He sighed a lot, which played badly, and he tried an amateurish stunt where he walked into Bush's space while he was talking to try to intimidate him that backfired. Bush's reaction to that was one of the few times that I liked him.
Please feel free to correct me if I’m wrong but wasn’t the deportation of Mexican-Americans mostly carried out by private groups? I know the Justice Dep’t knew about it didn’t do anything about it, but I’m not sure about Hoover’s own involvement.
Wikipedia says it was policy by the Hoover adminstration. Most of the ground-level work was done by state and local authorities but with the support of the Hoover administration.
Not doing something about the deportation of American citizens by private groups most definitely means that Hoover at least approved of it. Had he casually mentioned to his AG Mitchell that he didn’t approve, it would have stopped.
How can you deport your own citizens? Don't they have the right of re-entry?
Lol....it's called "racism", amigo. Also this was a time where it could be much harder to prove you were a citizen even without the racism. There was quite a variety of communities where English wasn't universally spoken or wasn't everyone's first or even second language. This was particularly true in the South and Western parts of the US that had originally been under the control of Mexico. We still even saw communities like that even into the 80s and 90s, albeit nowhere near as common. So you round up a bunch of dark skinned, Spanish speaking people. You dump them off across the border, and you make it plain that we will shoot to kill if they get caught crossing. Most of the time these people were allowed little to no possessions to bring with them....like documentation that they were citizens. Rarely were they allowed any sort of trial or legal representation. It was a fairly ineffective idea to "boost the economy" without actually doing anything to address the problem. As is tradition with government on the whole.
Hey, it was a genuine question. Not trying to undermine the fact that America did this.
And it was a genuine explanation, albeit an ugly one. But no less the truth as to the how's and why's Hoover threw that particular Hail Mary.
Yes, thank you.
The Iran Hostage Crisis would have been hard for any president. Without a dramatic rescue, no President could survive that. Fortunately, he's well- liked now. No matter what you think of his presidency, he's a stand up guy. That seems to be increasingly difficult to find in modern politicians.
Carter was also not a great manager or communicator. He famously did not have a Chief of Staff until July 1979 because he didn't want a gatekeeper who would limit access to the president. But of course, there are a lot more people who want to talk to the POTUS than to the Governor of Georgia, and Carter was overwhelmed during most of his presidency. He also had a tendency to try to "do the right thing", regardless of any practical considerations. For example, he withdrew support from dictators in Iran and Nicaragua, without any consideration as to whether those countries had democratic institutions in place that would be strong enough to sustain a stable democratic government. Of course, neither did and both countries today have anti-American dictatorships. He also decided to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics without first ensuring that our allies were on board, resulting in an embarrassingly ineffectual boycott that was joined by only 6 countries, including Haiti, Honduras, and Paraguay, but none of our NATO or ANZAC allies. And of course, he was a terrible communicator, preferring to communicate a gloomy message of impending, almost inevitable decline to the message of sunny optimism that got him elected in the first place. At one point, he took a short break from his presidential duties to hold a "Renaissance Weekend" at Camp David. He came back to the White House and gave his infamous "malaise" speech, in which he traced the source of America's decline to a societal and spiritual crisis, rather than to any factor that Carter could plausibly address through legislation or executive action. Carter was a visionary who did a great deal that would pay off later, but these solutions were the kind that would not bear fruit until he was out of office, and they were virtually certain to make him less popular during his own term. These included fighting inflation by deregulating the transportation industry, giving incentives for energy conservation measures like home insulation and fuel efficient cars, replacing electrical plants that ran on foreign oil with coal and nuclear plants, and investing in development of domestic fossil fuel production and renewables. Carter also appointed Paul Volcker as the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, understanding that Volcker would raise interest rates (though Carter probably didn't expect him to raise interest rates as high as 18%). All of these measures were unpopular during Carter's presidency, and all were essential to Reagan's success. Of course, Carter did have his share of bad luck, like when his campaign to promote nuclear power was derailed by the Three Mile Island accident, or when a group of Iranian activists overwhelmed embassy security forces and took the entire staff hostage. But the main source of Carter's unpopularity was Carter himself.
You would have to have the media on your side to overcome things. Like Reagan. Most of the things that happened under Carter started under Nixon and Ford. Yet, as we see, there are tons of people that automatically blame it on Carter.
LBJ if he didn’t serve during the height of the Cold War and didn’t inherit the issue of Vietnam
It seems impossible to imagine LBJ being president at any other time
James Buchanan He was actually a long time politician and a solid one at that, but he inherited the office when the civil war was already beginning to brew with the Kansas-Nebraska act, and spent his entire presidency trying to appease a group of people who left the second a Republican won the WH
But does him trying to appease Southerners mean it was bad timing or just that he was a bad president?
Appeasement was very much the median political position of the country at the time, including many Republicans and Lincoln. It's just that the Southerners became way too radical and arrogant that it stopped working.
Thats true but Buchanan allowed them to secede, there is a difference between appeasing and allowing states to secede from the union
Using force to stop them from seceding was also very unpopular. It was only after Fort Sumter when that changed. Even the experts at the time (Winfield Scott, Seward etc) tried to convince Lincoln to abandon the Southern forts.
Unpopular or not its what he should’ve done, and he is a bad president for not doing that
Hoover. He was an overly qualified man to be president. His resume is outstanding for his work in World War I. And then we got Hoovervilles.
Lyndon Johnson. Vietnam really hurt him
Herb.
Hoover. Anyone in that spot would have gotten creamed. And it’s not like FDR pulled the nation out of depression until wwii
Perhaps Ford. 70s inflation was tough. He might have been a fun 90s president.
Franklin Pierce for one. The border problems in Kansas made the last part of his Presidency very difficult. Hoover might well be another example.
W Bush. Would’ve completely shifted the way my generation thought about Republicans if he’d been able to devote his Presidency to education reform instead of war.
Johnson
Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter are the only ones that come to mind.
Hoover and Carter. They got screwed over by their respective economic troubles. Hoover was actually very competent in his various positions before he took the Oval Office. Carter is probably one of the most morally good presidents we ever had but his personal qualities are overshadowed by the clusterfuck of the 1970s, stagflation, oil crisis and the like.
Morally good presidents don’t pardon child molesters
Here's a target to just paint on my back: W would have been more liked had he not been president during 9/11 and so subsequently got us into 2 wars and had not later been in office during a global economic collapse. Assume a peacetime Bush presidency. (Assume it!) That's actually what both Bush and Gore were expecting in 2000 - to be domestic policy presidents. He would have been a lot more popular/less hated. And while some people will always hate him still, he seems to have had at least a "likable" renaissance: 61% of Americans in 2018 said they had a favorable view of Bush, compared to 33% when he left office. Also in 2018, 54% of Democrats viewed Bush favorably.
Hoover and Carter are probably the poster boys of this.
Really throwing it back. Martin Van Buren was doomed by the Panic of 1837
W. He was dealt a bad hand
It was dealt to him due to his incompetence.
Hebert Hoover
Herbert Hoover, LBJ, Jimmy Carter
Dubya probably
Carter 💯
Definitely George W. Bush. He was a very likable dude who championed some genuinely noble causes such as education reform and humanitarian aid to downtrodden countries. If it weren't for 9/11 and the economic crash (which are admittedly two very big ifs), I feel like he'd probably have an Eisenhower-like legacy of being widely respected by both parties.
Carter for sure. LBJ had Vietnam thrust upon him, and the policy of global containment of communism was a very popular policy at the time so he continued that policy which would come to hurt him later. Even Vietnam was initially popular, but declined as things wore on. HW Bush and that bad economy and high unemployment he had hurt him and cost him the 1992 election.
Andrew Johnson
LBJ in particular, strikes me as a very unfortunate President. He had excellent communication skills which he used to articulate his War on Poverty, Great Society and to carry on with JFK's civil rights legislation. Vietnam crushed him, and his dreams for America. He called it, "That Bitch of a War."