Who was the best president in US history?

James K. Polk

When he took office on March 4, 1845, Polk, at 49, became the youngest man at the time to assume the presidency. According to a story told decades later by George Bancroft, Polk set four clearly defined goals for his administration:

Reestablish the Independent Treasury System;
Reduce tariffs;
Acquire some or all of Oregon Country:
Acquire/buy California and New Mexico from Mexico.
Pledged to serve only one term, he accomplished all these objectives in just four years. By linking acquisition of new lands in Oregon (with no slavery) and Texas (with slavery), he hoped to satisfy both North and South.

He did what he promised without any bullshit

That is a president if anything.

The Roosevelts. Teddy brought the progressive era which saw economic growth, Frankilin brought the new deal to expand the US infrastructure an job market. While both were amazing foreign policy leaders, after Mckinely made the US an imperial power Teddy insured our hegemonic power and Franklin was the perfect commander in chief who oversaw victory in the Second World War and set America on the path of international super power.

Teddy was top notch, but the only good thing about Franklin was that he died in office

The best americans president is a non american president. Fucking pigs

Van Buren?

I think he means the Kenyan

Millard Fillmore. Why? Because his name was Millard Fillmore.

>You can't fuck anything up if you literally do nothing at all

Immigration Act of 1990 and beginning the discussions on NAFTA should rank him near the bottom.

The ability to impose our will on the world is vastly overstated and has been since the failure of the Korean War. Even with the Gulf War what did we accomplish? Saddam remained in power, still did his same shit, nothing really changed. We go in, shoot some guys then think that installing puppet rulers and client states is the way to go while getting nothing in return: 15 years in Afghanistan and it's the Chinese reaping the rewards and resource extraction not us.

This
kek

Taft was also good. FDR is a mixed bag I feel.

He's from the parallel universe where George Romney won.

His policy to deal with Iraq post war sowed the seeds for conflict, instead of marching to Baghdad and overthrowing the government he put sanctions on Iraq crippling and basically unwinding any notion of Iraqi identity. The world would have been a better place if we replaced Saddam in the 90s and it's likely ISIS would have never existed.

>Bush Sr.

Don't mind me playing psychologist here, but were you around 10 years old during his presidency OP?

Kek. He's probably ten years old now!

Is it coincidence that the paranoid and delusional are attracted to a senile geriatric?

The acquisition of territory under Polk's administration deeply aggravated the differences between north & south. He capitulated on American claims in the Oregon territory in order to wage an unnecessary war against Mexico in order to lay conquest to their land, and he couldn't have run for a second term even if he wanted to, he was dying by the end of his first term and would be dead several months after leaving office.

Illiterate retard mass murderer? Let me guess: youre alt right

You can best judge a man by his enemies. Franklin Delano "Thundercock" Roosevelt leaves stormniggers, wehraboos, and lolbertarians in shambles to this day while laying the groundwork for the peak of American prosperity (late 1940s-1970s).

The fact that the war happened at all was a failure of US diplomacy.

It was bound to happen, and not because of Saddam's policy.

Meh, I'm nearly five times that age, and I voted for Bush Sr. at both opportunities.

He wasn't that bad, he just got stuck with some shitty jobs. Panama had to be done, wouldn't have mattered who was in office, we aren't giving the most important sea-lane on the planet over to someone who isn't going to play ball. Iraq was a result of some diplomatic snafus essentially giving Saddam permission to take Kuwait. I suppose he could have kept a closer leash on his diplomatic wing in the middle east, and done something to bring justice to that situation before it escalated into war, but once the deed was done (and I'm kinda surprised Reagan never did - but I suppose he was a bit distracted), but letting Iraq keep Kuwait wasn't economically viable.

True, the response was simultaneously too harsh and too weak, but anything more or less probably wouldn't have been politically viable.

Certainly not the best president ever, but he did about the best one could expect with the deck he was dealt.

He is definitely one of the most underrated but will never be a top tier prez imo. He was better for the country than Clinton but people still revere slick Willie and disparage GHWB.
It is hard to say who the best President was. Even the best ones made mistakes and presidents that were in office during war time get more credit for their successes and less flack for their failures. Rutherford B. Hayes is another underrated President.

Bush's mistake was calling on Shiites and Kurds to revolt and doing jack shit to support them while Saddam slaughtered them en masse. He should have either said nothing after liberating Kuwait or actually backed them up; half-efforts tend to turn out the worst of all.

He also continued and expanded the toxic "tough on crime"/War on Drugs nonsense while his 1988 campaign was toxic even by the standards of American politics, essentially slandering a moderate technocrat as a communist because he opposed the death penalty on religious grounds. The media was complicit in that too; fucking asking Dukakis how he would feel about his wife being raped and murdered is just horrible.

If Bush Sr isn't actually retarded, how do you explain Yeb and Dubya?

Down Syndrome is epigenetic.

>Bush Sr.
Nothing triggers my autism more than people using "Sr." and "Jr." when refering to the Bush's.

Meh, fair points. That was part of my complaint about the fiasco that was Iraq: always simultaneously too much and too little. In the long run, liberating Kuwait, rather than recognizing our former ally's grievances, cost more than it saved, but hindsight is 20x20 and all.

However, although Clinton advocated for treatment instead of incarceration during his 1992 presidential campaign, for all his apparent "I didn't inhale" tolerance, he really did more to make the war on drugs worse than Bush Sr. ever did. Granted, despite being a Democrat, he also did more to eliminate welfare and enforce "free trade" than Bush Sr. ever did.

Dukakis just never stood a chance with that name, and no one wanted to go back to the policies of Carter he was pushing for.

>fucking asking Dukakis how he would feel about his wife being raped and murdered is just horrible.

that's a good point. It sounds like something you'd expect from Trump v Hillary

My bad...

"Dubbya" and "Ayesh Dubbya" it is then.

>GB Senior
>created a surplus

Centrist here, is this one of these "alternative facts" that the left and right are so fond of these days?

>since the failure of the Korean War

No idea why people always call it a failure. Sure the DPRK still exists, but the ROK wouldn't if we didn't intervene and now they are one of our most useful allies.

It was a solution no one was happy with.

Can't call it a total loss, but can't call it a win either.

...Especially considering the long term consequences. I mean, let's face it, having China own that whole peninsula would be preferable to having Kimmy there.

Status quo ante bellum in a defensive war is a victory by definition.

Terrible. The worst mistake he made was not finishing the job in the first gulf war and removing Saddam while America would have had no one opposing them.

I wouldn't call the 38th parallel "status quo".

Yer probably too young to remember, but if anything, the opposition to the first gulf war was worse than the second.

READ

MY

LISPS

Polk is responsible for the Civil War and the 600 thousand dead Americans

>He also continued and expanded the toxic "tough on crime"/War on Drugs nonsense while his 1988 campaign was toxic even by the standards of American politics

Meth destroys people, heroin destroys people, LSD can fry your brain permanently, cocaine ruins you, PCP turns you insane. The only drug that isn't immediately destructive is marijuana, which itself funds cartels. Bush was in the right.

mass incarceration also does a pretty good job of ruining people desu ne

...

Solved the Indian problem

Killed a bunch savages that would have had to been dealt with.
Also alt right is over, it's now mainstream. Your side is losing.

These aren't good people. lock them up.

>The only drug that isn't immediately destructive is marijuana, which itself funds cartels.
Drugs don't fund cartels.

Drugs being illegal funds cartels.

I realize Prohibition was while ago, but I think we have enough mob stories in the modern media that people should remember the consequences of it. (Though I suppose The Sopranos did end rather abruptly.)

dubya was just pretending to be retarded

>implying
youtube.com/watch?v=YENbElb5-xY

It was the best-managed war the US has had for a long, long time

You posted the wrong President Johnson

>Status quo ante bellum in a defensive war is a victory by definition.
Yeah.

By BOTH sides, considering it became pretty defensive for the commies when NK was invaded.

Barack Obama
Nobel Peace Prize Winner
First black president
Good role model for inner city youths
Ended the war in Iraq
Need I say more

>Nobel Peace Prize Winner
He did get the nobel peace price literally before he had done anything
>First black president
Hardly says anything about his presidency

Good luck with those Talibans

>this contrarianism

>first black president
If you judge him as being good because of the color of his skin then thats just raciest.

It makes me feel crestfallen when I ask people "What do you remember Barack Obama for?" and if people say "He was our first black president" I feel a bit of me die inside that they name something that he didn't do such as working to prevent the economic collapse or getting Osama Bin Ladden served to justice, or being the first president to begin expanding the drone arsenal.

but I thought the only reason he died was because he got cholera after moving back to his estate from DC

>but the only good thing about Franklin was that he died in office
edgy

Obama is a president who will ultimately have his legacy decline as time goes on instead of improve.

He barely did fucking anything in office. Left Iraq only to go back in years later. Didn't do anything about Syria, Ukraine, or North Korea. Obamacare did nothing to unburden the rising costs of healthcare. Race relations and national unity deteriorated greatly in his presidency, yet he escaped blame for any of it.

Obama is the very definition of a "Half-measure" president. Too much of a pussy to use his high popularity to do things that went against his base but needed to be done, and too egotistical to feign incompetence/malice when it was appropriate to achieve results that he couldn't take credit for.

His greatest failure was his inability to turn heel. He let the blame for everything fall on Republicans despite obviously agreeing with their obstruction, since he could have just strong-armed many of the things he pretended to advocate for using his high approval ratings.

Obama is somewhat of a self-serving prick who was only concerned with being showered with praise. He's the kind of person that would become a dictator if term limits didn't exist.

I believed he was already sick in his finals days if office but I'm not absolutely certain.

Nixon did nothing wrong

He did plenty wrong. Lacked the charisma to sell the public on finishing the Vietnam war when we were so close to total victory, and made too many enemies by being a total cunt.

The definition of a mixed bag. It's my opinion that his domestic programs were a huge harm to the economy, plus the whole internment camps thing, but we couldn't have asked for a better person to handle foreign affairs.

>You know, I really don't think about him (Bin Laden) that much. Terror is bigger than one person…

What did he mean by this?