My Top Five Worst Presidents… Discuss.

5. James Buchanan/Warren Harding (tie) - Once you get past the top four below it gets kind of difficult, except Nixon has to be somewhere in the Top 10. I figured I’d just go with these guys who consistently rank near the bottom in most polls. The secession of the southern states began, of course, on Buchanan’s watch and he failed to do anything about it. (Furthermore I have to figure if he had been a decent president, the Democrats would have won in 1860 and there wouldn’t have been a War of Northern Aggression.) Harding was, as everyone knows, corrupt and from Ohio too. Mike DeWine and George Voinovich are from Ohio. You do the math.

4. Jimmy Carter - Two words: North Korea. (Bonus points for being the POTUS whose worst offenses came after leaving office.)

3. Lyndon Baines Johnson - Medicare, Medicaid, and “The Great Society” generally; Title VII of the Civil Rights Act; dramatically expanding our involvement in the Second Indochina War (AKA Vietnam) without a realistic strategy for victory and without being forthright with the American people.

2. Abraham Lincoln - Reckless disregard for civil liberties and the Constitution; unnecessarily provoked the Confederacy to military action at Fort Sumter, costing the Union the allegiance of four states in the aftermath and nearly costing it four more; achieving the political success of the Whig agenda at the cost of 620,000 dead.

1. Franklin Roosevelt - Did more to undermine the concept of constitutional government than anyone outside the judicial branch.

Runner Up: Richard M. Nixon - I know Nixon is somewhere in the Top 10, but he is really hard to place because when you get to “Pretty Bad” but not “Evil” you begin to run into those, “Which is worse, being wrong or being ineffective?” questions. Nixon belongs on the Top 10 Worst Presidents for both ethical and policy failings. While not from the Rockefeller wing of the GOP, he embraced a watered-down conservativism that enabled things like wage/price controls and Affirmative Action to gain acceptance in a Republican administration. His ethical failures, while bad enough in their own right, were also enough to get him driven from office so Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger could remove any doubt that we had lost Vietnam of our own free will. And with Kissinger at his side, he initiated the balance-of-power obsessed, detente foreign policy that allowed the USSR to run the table throughout the 1970s.