I was considering posting about a completely superfluous article in The Atlantic called “Why Biden Just Can’t Shake Trump in the Polls,” as an insult to the intelligence of the literate American public. Gee, that’s a tough one! What could the answer be (other than the fact that the biased and dishonest American pollsters haven’t started cheating yet)?
Could it be, perhaps, that Joe Biden has been a spectacular failure in the White House by almost any measure, has overseen an unprecedented attack on personal liberties and Constitution, has directed a banana republic-style effort to remove his primary political opponent by abuse of the justice system, and is older than dirt? Could it be that he is obviously in a state of cognitive decline from an intellectual foundation that was never adequate in the first place? I suppose readers of the Atlantic are so Trump-Deranged and dyed-in-indigo blue that none of that would occur to them.
This, in turn, got me thinking about my still-unfinished survey to determine whether Joe is the Worst American President Ever. I stalled after covering Woodrow Wilson, and realizing again how that awful man laps the field, making the task of covering the group of 18 POTUSes remaining (Woody was only #28) seem like a low priority. But the report about Biden’s statements in Florida over the weekend sparked an epiphany: even if Joe isn’t the worst President, he is unquestionably the dumbest. I don’t think anyone else comes close.
Back to Florida: After the President toured the damage in Florida from Hurricane Idalia, he had to politicize the visit by stating,
“Nobody can deny the impact of the climate crisis—at least nobody intelligent can deny the impact of the climate crisis anymore. Just look around, around the nation and the world for that matter. Historic floods, intense droughts, extreme heat, deadly wildfires that have caused serious damage that we’ve never seen before.”
But, of course, “we” have seen it before, all of it, and many times. Making that statement in the wake of any hurricane is fatuous, because it implies that a hurricane, arriving in hurricane season, doing the same kind of damage countless other hurricanes have inflicted (and often worse) for centuries is evidence of the climate change “crisis.” It isn’t. [ Above you can see some of the carnage from the hurricane that flattened Galveston, Texas, a storm generally regarded as the most worst in U.S. history. It occurred in August of 1900. I wonder if Biden knows about the Galveston storm. Or if he can spell “Galveston”…] If Biden were not such a dummy, my assumption would be that he just thinks the American public is stupid, and that he was engaged in dishonesty, as he so often is. This is frequently the conundrum with this President: is he saying something outrageous because he’s an idiot, or because he thinks most voters are idiots?
Since both are the case, I suppose it doesn’t matter.
Ethics Alarms 
Hold on: Woodrow wasn’t the 19th president… He can’t have been only the 3rd POTUS after Abe.
Ugh. He was 28. Harding was elected in 1920, and my beleaguered brain momentarily translated that into him being the 20th President, making Wilson the 19th. Thanks. Fixed.
While what you write is true, how does anyone have a chance of facts reaching the majority? The children’s education has been ridden with untruths instead of facts for YEARS. The elites ( I guess that is what they call themselves now), the major newspapers, and T.V. outlets keep pushing the falsehoods upon the majority. The untruths are gobbled up like children starving for affection with overwhelming appetites for candy.
A part of the news media reporting falsehood while presenting themselves as entertainers is because they know people want entertainment and not facts. Just like children being read their favorite fairy tale, the viewing audience believes in the fantasy, whether it be a harmful fantasy or not.
A majority of the people were never taught the importance of or were never taught how to research for truths to weigh the facts.
There’s nothing like communist indoctrination, and it is successful so far.
SloJo’s friends don’t even seem to support him on this (although they dutifully laded this 2022 article with plenty of “…even so, maybe this bad thing, and this one…”)
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/27/weather/tropical-cyclone-frequency-21st-century-climate/index.html
Maybe they’ll have to go and retroactively edit that piece, like they’ve done with others.
There’s this handy guide: https://nypost.com/2022/06/07/worst-hurricanes-in-us-history/#1 Having grown up in Miami, Florida, my personal favorites are the 1926 Hurricane and Hurricane Donna (I was nine at the time, so Donna was a big deal. Knocked down a huge tree in our backyard, which fell the only way it could have without hitting our or our neighbor’s houses). Of course, there was also the 1927 Hurricane which demolished the “Oversea” railroad to Key West, knocking entire trains filled with workers in dormitory cars into the ocean. I believe the 1938 New England Hurricane was really significant in that it was predicted by the guy who essentially singlehandedly created Hurricane path prediction, but it may have been a later hurricane. I also believe ’38 also destroyed Katharine Hepburn’s familial estate on Long Island. Good friends of ours rode out Andrew with their two girls in a bathtub in their house as the house wash shredded around them. And then there was the Hurricane of 1948 or so that flooded Miami. A family friend marked the high-water mark on their farm about twelve feet up a power pole. And John Hope of The University of Miami Hurricane Center and the Weather Channel fame was the paterfamilias of a family at our high school. Hurricanes are and always have been ferocious. They weren’t invented by the Columbia School of Journalism. And what about all the hurricanes that destroyed Spanish Galleons? And wasn’t the Spanish Armada sunk by a hurricane rather than Admiral Nelson?
Given the opportunity, I’d say, “Fuck you, Joe.”
The only thing that could stop me from putting Joe Biden at the absolute bottom of the list of the 46 is that his time in the White House is not up yet and it is dangerous to rate someone before you have the distance of history and can make a truly objective assessment. Out of the 46, I would exclude Garfield and W.H. Harrison, because of their brief tenures in which they did very little. I’m not sure we can have an objective view of Obama at this point, simply because any criticism of him is viewed as racist by too many people, no matter how objective it may be. I’m not sure we’re ever going to get any kind of objective assessment of Trump, who is just so hated by so many people that an objective analysis is probably impossible, and won’t be possible for probably at least two or three more decades. Also, his time in the White House may not be completely over, we just don’t know. Generally speaking, Washington, Lincoln, and FDR are thought of as the top three presidents. Even so, Washington was a slave owner, Lincoln had American Indian prisoners executed, and FDR turned back Jews fleeing Nazi Germany and mistreated Japanese Americans, so even they are not particularly admirable in some people’s minds. Pretty much every other president has something wrong with him that makes him, at least to the current elite’s view, not worthy of admiration. John Adams few people know much about, Jefferson was a slave owner and kept an enslaved mistress and so on. There are a few Kennedy worshipers and Carter worshipers still floating around, but Kennedy recedes further and further into the past, and the vast majority of folks have come to the conclusion that Carter was really nothing all that great, character and post presidency aside. There will always be a few Obama worshipers, but eventually, outside the African-American community and white liberals I think people will conclude that all he really had going for him was his skin color.
But the real question here, is the question of who is the absolute bottom of the barrel? The answer is it depends. It really depends on what your criteria for placing someone at the top or the bottom of the rankings is. Generally the criteria should include the handling of crises, appointments, and political skill. Together that tells you how effective this person was. At least one book I read judges presidents on their character and integrity, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a good criterion or at least not as important as the other three. Also, all too often it is used as an excuse to devalue a president whose values do not happen to coincide with the values of the one doing the reviewing. LBJ gets high marks for political skill, but his score for achievements and crisis management would be middle of the road because although the civil Rights Act was passed on his watch and he created the Great Society, he severely mishandled Vietnam. I would give both bushes high marks for appointments, I might even give Trump High marks for appointments since they all moved us closer and closer to a Supreme Court that was going to start reversing some of the activist excesses of the court in the 60s and 70s. Others might give all of them little marks for just that reason. I think Trump generally otherwise gets low marks for appointments, however I’m not sure that is a fair test of his abilities since too many of the best people treated him like he was made of kryptonite because they feared how the elites would react to anyone who served in a Trump administration. It’s really not fair to judge someone objectively when you know for a fact the deck is or was stacked against him. However, the absolute bottom of the barrel of the presidents probably still would include Warren Harding, for allowing the major scandal of teapot dome to happen on his watch, partly due to his appointment of Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, about whom apparently no one bothered to ask the question “just how did this guy get so rich so fast?”. Harding picks up a few points because he wisely did not interfere with the recovery from the Panic of 1921. I think Pierce belongs down at the bottom as well, simply because he was a one-term drunk. He doesn’t land at the absolute bottom because he suffered a horrible personal tragedy right before assuming office, and he never got over that. I won’t put Ulysses s Grant down at the bottom either, because I think he was a victim of frankly lousy press by academics. He loses points for his failed policy with the American indians, but beyond that there’s really not much to dislike him for. He was a War hero turned president who was perhaps in a little bit over his head who tried to knit a country that had just been through a horrible Civil War back together again. Most people seem to have the dim idea that after the surrender at Appomattox everything was fine, and have forgotten the difficulties of reconstruction, which frankly could have been a lot harsher than it was. It pains me to put Woodrow Wilson, who led this country through World War I, at the bottom or near the bottom, because I think wartime leaders should be given a certain level of difference as opposed to those who led only in peacetime. However, he loses points for being unquestionably the biggest racist ever to occupy the White House, who actually moved integration in this country back. Even that might not put him there, but now that we have the distance of history, we can see that his getting the US involved in World War I in which fight we really did not have a dog, and his horrible handling of the treaty of Versailles did nothing but set this country and the world up for the ugliest war ever in history, to say nothing of the human rights disaster that accompanied it. The third strike is him suffering a stroke which disabled him and continuing to remain in office, allowing the country to be illegally run by his wife and his closest informal advisors. That should never have happened. However, the bottom of the list probably belongs to James Buchanan at this point. I am sorry to say that he was a man who was in over his head with the presidency and the time he was president was the absolute worst time for a man to be in that office who was in over his head maybe the Civil War was inevitable, and maybe it wasn’t, but I don’t think there’s any way around the fact that James Buchanan did very little if anything to stop it. No other president holds the distinction of having allowed the country to essentially disintegrate on his watch. It doesn’t matter what you think about January 6th and it doesn’t matter what you think about the turbulent 1960s. The only president who saw the country coming apart and ultimately let It come apart was Buchanan. No matter what anyone says about Trump, that’s the closest this country ever came to ceasing to exist, and I dare anyone to argue with that fact.
How does Biden stack up against this so far? Well, he is not someone who self-medicates to the point of being ineffective like Pierce, but that’s about all he has going for him when he stacks up against the worst Presidents. So far, his handling of the various crises on his watch has mostly consisted of hand waving them away, the border is secure, there is no inflation, we’re doing just fine abroad. As far as Biden is concerned the only crises are racism, climate change, and access to abortion. Well I’m sorry, but hand waving crises away does not mean they have gone away and it’s certainly not managing them. As for appointments, you only get a post in this administration if you were in Obama’s administration or if you check a box. Competence and ability really don’t get you anywhere. Appointing people based on whether they check a box is no way to run an administration. In this case it’s gotten us some doozies. However, the real elephant in the room is his own lack of competence. Biden was never the brightest bulb in the box, and his way of handling people was to frustrate them to the point where they simply gave up trying to discuss anything with him. He generally went where the wind was going and was for the death penalty and limits on abortion until he wasn’t. However, at this point there is simply nothing there when you look at him. I’m not a qualified doctor and I can’t make a diagnosis, but I was there for all of the Reagan years and I can tell you that even when Reagan was at his most out of it, with the exception of the reception for mayor’s gone awry and the one television interview which he lost it in, he was better than Biden on his best day. Biden has already had more than two incidents in which he is gone completely out of it and had to be led off of stage or said things that had nothing to do with the current event. Yet the same liberal people who swore up and down that Reagan was senile and needed to be pushed out of office are the same liberal people who swear up and down now that Biden is just fine. He’s not just fine, and everyone can see it. I’ve characterized him several times as one third fading grandfather, 1/3 punch-drunk boxer, and 1/3 creepy uncle. At this point the latter two are fading away and he is becoming all fading grandfather, that pathetic figure in your family who you have watched degenerate from reasonably confident and intelligent to a frail shell of a man who can barely find his way home, who would lock the door because he feared someone would sneak up on him, and now barely remember how to lock the door or whether he locked it. The thing is, most families who have such a person in them would have him declared incompetent and take over his affairs to prevent him from being swindled or robbed by the unscrupulous. Eventually they would pack him off to a nursing home or hospice when it was clear he needed more looking after than the family could or would give him on their own. That is a lousy way for a life to end, but there’s no way around it most of the time. The president is at the point where most families would consider doing just that, but his allies forbid saying that and the other side doesn’t dare say it. I haven’t been impressed at all with Biden’s performance as president so far, and I think we all have to face up to the fact that it’s just going to get worse, it’s not going to get better. If he is re-elected next year and is able to hang on, I would respectfully say that it is only a matter of time before he says something or does something with dire consequences for the country. Do we even want to talk about how he would handle a truly national disaster or an attack? Didn’t think so. The only thing frankly that is going to save Biden from being 46th of 46 is going to be him dying in office before something really bad happens.
Not fair: I haven’t finished my full review yet. If you review the series so far, Pierce, Buchanan, A. Johnson and Wilson lead the field, and Haven’t made a call yet. However [Spolier Alert]: Buchanan was hopeless and over his head, but there was literally nothing he could have done. Nothing: the nation was going to have a Civil War, or split into two countries. I give Buchanan credit for not provoking or encouraging the split (you’ll recall he had the ethics zugzwang position of arguing that the South had no right to secede but the US had no right to stop it if it did.) he at least kept the status quo until a President with some brass and vision could take over. Net harm: Zero.
Wilson has at least four strikes: you left out his decision, recently explored by historians, to send infected soldiers over to Europe for the stupid war, thus spreading the Spanish Flu far and wide. Biden is an easy victor as worst single-term President over Adams, Madison,Pierce and Buchanan, and A. Johnson, but he’s still got a year to go.
“He’s still got a year to go?” To what? Hah! Get even worse?
And isn’t Biden unique in that he’s just a sock puppet. Wouldn’t you really have to call it the Klain presidency or the Committee presidency? I don’t think he’s had any input into any decision his entire term.
He is not unique actually. After his stroke Wilson was essentially a sock puppet for his wife and closest advisors.
But Steve, unlike Wilson, Biden has never been competent for a single day of his term.
I noticed you used a paywall bypassing website and left it in your live link. I debate the ethics of using such a service, even at someone as ethically challenged and vile as The Atlantic.