When I finally completed my laborious examination of the Worst Presidents Ever, an exercise that ended with #46, Joe Biden, winning the booby prize, I “reluctantly” left Barack Obama out of the final nine (Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Joe Biden.) Of Obama I wrote,
Barack Hussein Obama, #44 (2009-2017) is a perplexing case. Right now he is a wildly over-rated President, and given the overwhelming progressive bias in the academic ranks of historians, that false assessment is likely to be around for a while. It was under Obama, and in part because of him, that journalists almost completely abandoned objectivity and fairness. He joined the Democrats in conning and manipulating the nation into the highly flawed “Affordable Care Act,” and lied outright to get it passed. Obama’s policies slowed what should have been a boom recovery from the 2008 crash; he was feckless and dithering in foreign policy, typified by his ludicrous “red line” threat regarding Syria. His payoff to Iran for a dubious promise to to nuke Israel until Barack and Michelle were deep into retirement was one of the most cynical and ill-conceived bargains in U.S. foreign policy history.
A President who entered the White House creating hope that he would finally end racial tensions, Barack Obama made them worse. Obama completed the transformation of the Attorney General’s office into a purely political and partisan position; he gave cover to incompetents and Machiavellian leftists. There was the Benghazi attack, the I.R.S. Tea Party group scandal, the ATF gunwalking fiasco, and more: like President Biden, but not to the same extent, President Obama kept loyal incompetents in office, assisted throughout by a lapdog news media. Obama’s racial favoritism, his inattention to illegal immigration, and his inability or refusal to seek compromise with the Republican Senate locked in grid-lock as the status quo. His arrogance and open disdain for white, religious, non-elite Americans launched the political career of Donald Trump and was the catalyst for the chaos that followed…is following.
Barack Obama has a lot to answer for. Nevertheless, he played the role of President as well as anyone since Ronald Reagan. He was an excellent speaker when he stuck to a script. His greatest accomplishment as President was getting elected twice as a black man—that, together with his maintenance and elevation of the image of the President takes him out of the running for Worst President Ever. Barely
Do I regret leaving him out of the Worst finals? Increasingly I do, though he would not have topped Biden for the title. At least Obama was really President. Still, as more of his complicity in the Russian Collusion Hoax becomes apparent, Obama appears more and more to have been one of the Dark Ones, like Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon.
But he was black, you see. Just as Boomers can’t accept the reality that their martyred hero JFK was really a sexual predator and a blundering President, progressives still battle reality in their skulls to maintain the myth that Obama wasn’t a ruthless machine politician determined to remake the U.S. into an oppressive woke paradise by any means necessary.
But slowly—surely?— the myth is dissipating. The ex-President’s graceless refusal to acknowledge President Trump in his note of praise for the Israel-Hamas deal was signature significance for a petty asshole, but truth be told, the last six Presidents, from Trump to Clinton, are all assholes, just different types. Some hide it better (Bush, Obama) than others (Trump, of course).
However, there are signs that Obama’s mask has slipped once too often. An Ann Althouse post concerned comic Marc Maron’s ending his podcasting with a final interview with Obama that O had the audacity to tweet was about “decency in an age of division.” Obama has some nerve talking about an age of division as if he weren’t one of the prime architects of it, but I was stunned at the vehemence of Ann’s commentariate regarding the ex-President. There are 114 comments on the post; not all of them are about Obama, but just a handful say anything positive about him. Althouse runs a left-leaning blog that once had a substantially progressive readership, but either most of them have been red-pilled, or the progressives have fled Althouse like they fled EA once they realized they were losing fact-based arguments.
Here’s a typical comment on that post: “For many people there’s a feeling that you’ve seen that he’s an empty suit, that the emperor has no clothes, yet many people don’t believe it. It wasn’t hard to believe that Biden was a naked emperor running around without his head, but for a long time people resisted admitting that about Obama.” One of the cruder ones: “My initial 2008 characterization of Obama as a piece of shit has held up.”
I was writing that Obama was a weak and feckless POTUS early in his first term, and was certain Romney would win in 2012 as a result. I wrote, infamously, that Mitt Was It that year because Americans prefer strong Presidents. I took a lot of abuse from commenters when that proved to be a bad prediction, but I was right about Americans. I was just wrong about Romney. He was revealed during the campaign to be almost as feckless as Obama and the voters sniffed it out. Meanwhile Obama’s henchmen (like Harry Reid) ruthlessly smeared Mitt and he didn’t have the will or character to fight for the job he aspired to.
An aside: I just happened to look at EA’s statistics for the first time this year. I stopped checking views a few years ago because it just discouraged me: after the Great Exodus of the Trump Haters in 2017, my aspirations for the blog were crushed, and I resigned myself to a permanently small (though brilliant) readership. But traffic is up, in fact way up from a 2021, and getting back to the 3,000-3500 views a day range that seemed gone forever.
I have my theories why that is: one is articulated above by Fredo. For example, I was never fooled by Barack Obama. Those who paid attention here weren’t fooled either.
Ethics Alarms 
“But traffic is up, in fact way up from a 2021, and getting back to the 3,000-3500 views a day range that seemed gone forever.”
You gotta like that!
PWS
Just copied the same phrase and came here to offer congratulations — now I’ll just chime in “What CG/PWS[?] said!” Congratulations on the increased traffic!
” ‘What CG/P(aul)W(.)S(chlecht[?] said!’ “
My small, deeply disturbed following will approve.
PWS
Do I regret leaving him out of the Worst finals? Increasingly I do, though he would not have topped Biden for the title.
Are you so certain? It sure looks to me like Obama was (at minimum) one of Biden’s enablers, if not one of his puppeteers. Late in his second term, Obama was quoted musing about how nice it would be to have a face acting as President that he could manage from the background. I don’t find it far-fetched that that’s what happened.
We don’t have definitive proof of that yet. But if it emerges, it seems to me that you’d need to add Biden’s failures to the list of Obama’s. At which point, I don’t know how it woud be possible to call Obama anything other than the GOAT of bad presidents.
I hope the blog’s uptick in views is also due to an increasing return to sanity. I do think people are getting burned out on the toxic divisiveness. I do think they are becoming more aware of media bias. I do think they are recognizing extremist views for what they are.
But I also think that the far left progressives are deliberately isolating themselves in their protective bubbles so that they don’t have to engage with people who don’t agree with them. I know someone who found a Facebook profile of someone she had some things in common with, sent a friend request and was rejected because, after the person had clearly looked over her profile, he could never be friends with a Trump supporter because he is “an evil, evil man”.
That leaves people who aren’t in the bubble at least willing to keep an open mind about some things. How utterly exhausting it must be to exist in a perpetual state of outrage.
He recently did a sit-down interview with the new president of my erstwhile college: My Conversation At Hamilton College | by Barack Obama | Medium
You’ll note at the bottom of the transcript, he writes, “Written by Barack Obama, dad, husband, President, citizen.”
Who says they “wrote” an interview?
It’s kind of like watching the movie instead of reading the book. I’m still mystified as to how he became editor in chief of the Harvard Law Review.
I read through the comments and stopped on this one for a good chuckle:
This individual must have an ocean of historical knowledge…that’s about three microns deep.
Yes, I should have mentioned that few pro-Obama comments were idiotic. i think it was mean of Ann, who decided which comments to post, to post that one. How humiliating.
Proof positive that this person gets his information from Democrat Party-aligned listicles.
Really, I think the term “aware of” probably says it all.
It amazes me that someone this illiterate and ignorant reads Althouse at all. Or CAN read Althouse….
I’d love to ask him what constitutes a “Best” – or I assume he means successful – President. You tried to address that 11 years ago with your excellent rundown of our Presidents to date:
“First, I must ask, fail at what? Fail at solving problems? Fail at being popular? Fail by leaving the country in worse shape than when the President took office? Fail at leadership, at management, at foreign policy, at vision? Fail at handling crises? Fail by not dealing with long-term problems? By not bothering to define the central concept of his thesis, Cilizza just betrays his ignorance and laziness. If he won’t define his terms, he can’t be challenged.”
Ironically, the paragraph above was written, indeed the whole entry was, in response to Chris Cilizza’s assertion that the modern presidency sets the office holder up to fail (I wonder if he would say the same thing now that the office holder in question is not a Democrat?)
Barack Obama was successful only at being popular, a popularity propped up by a fawning news media and entertainment industry. You addressed the major missteps of his two-term administration in your entry of today, as well as his 15-year legacy of exacerbating racial tension and overall destructive divisiveness.
But, how, to anyone’s sane mind, would Kennedy and Carter be ranked among the best? Kennedy didn’t even serve a full term. Surely, the commenter has seen too many worshipful documentaries about the majesty of the Kennedy years if he’s too young to have experienced “Camelot” the way Martin Sheen did. This is what I mean when I refer to the way JFK’s reputation has been buffered and shined with polish by nearly every leading institution in the country for the last 60 years. It’s just taken for granted that he was one of our best Presidents.
And Carter is what blows my mind. A maybe nice guy. A salt-of-the-earth peanut farmer. A humanitarian. Maybe he’s all of those things but that does not make someone a good President. Until recently, Carter’s presidency has been nearly universally panned as ineffective. This revision began happening during the G. W. Bush Presidency and has continued unabated since.
As “when you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet,” “when you’re a Democrat, you’re a Democrat,” and it colors every aspect of your perception of reality.
Carter was a true Christian and in many ways admirable. He was also petty, petulant arrogant and way over his head as President.
Yes. Admirable, WAY over his head, and not a particularly quick study. Now, it can be said that all new presidents (especially if they didn’t have the background of serving as VP) are in over their heads at first.
But Carter (like some others!) didn’t seem to appreciate that he really needed to surround himself with people who DID have some of the background that he completely lacked.
Why didn’t he understand what was needed? Arrogance (beyond the usual higher-than-average self-regard required to run for the presidency in the first place), genuine ignorance of the depth of his own ignorance, a kind of simplicity of perspective that came from his Christian background that being a good person was enough, maybe all of the above? He seems not to have been a particularly complex person (unlike the truly fascinating Nixon).
I’m curious what stands out to you from the Carter years as particularly petty?