Experimental Blog #132

Comments on "Where They Stand - The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians" by Robert W. Merry

Rating all the American presidents from #1, the best, to #44, the worst, seems rather absurd and irrational. Besides that, do the terms "Great" and "Near Great" describe real human beings in a, hopefully, democratic society? The enormously changing times over 224 years make comparing the presidents of all 9 generations of very questionable value.

Probably, for most people the most important presidents are those that they remember and lived with, which, of course, is highly variable. Besides those presidents are some earlier presidents that their parents, or, maybe their grandparents, remember and lived with.

The author, Robert Merry, is very persuasive in some matters, for instance; that the electoral college still works to prevent the smaller states, by population, from being completely swamped by the larger states, even though this has led to the election of a president with slightly less{and always slightly less} popular votes than the other candidate in 4 presidential elections.

However, Merry also repeats the unconvincing story of the "stolen election", stolen by the Republicans, in 1876. Merry doesn't seem to consider the murderous violence commited against the southern Negroes to keep them from voting; and that they would surely have voted overwhelmingly for Rutherford B Hayes, who had 48% of the popular vote to the Democrat Samuel J Tilden's 51%. Hayes was not only a Republican of the party of Abraham Lincoln, but was also a distinguished Civil War veteran.

However, the idea that the American presidential elections are a "referendum" that, like it or not, occurs every 4 years on the incumbent president, or, at least, his party, is a very useful and helpful concept.