The worst Democrats to hold the presidency have been very bad indeed.
The worst Democrats to hold the presidency have been very bad indeed.
I n part one of this series, I ranked the nine best of our 18 Democratic presidents. Now, for the nine worst. Things go downhill in a hurry from here.
10. Martin Van Buren (1837–41)
Van Buren is perhaps the closest we have to a cipher among the Democratic presidents, with less good and bad to his name than the incomplete term of John F. Kennedy. He avoided doing very much of lasting consequence in office, and the economic disaster that cost him reelection was largely the doing of his predecessor. While Van Buren is a very important figure in American political history, his chief legacy was in politics rather than policy. As a senator, vice president, and then as president, he was central to creating the modern structures of a political party and to forging the alliance between big-city immigrant-driven political machines and Southern planters that would be the backbone of the Democrats’ coalition for over a century.
Pro: “Do no harm” may be the best defense for Van Buren, and like Grover Cleveland, he tried to stabilize the financial system in response to an economic mess (the Panic of 1837) that he didn’t create. He consistently avoided foreign crises, including (for better and worse) forestalling the annexation of Texas in the aftermath of the Battle of San Jacinto. He did little otherwise either to advance slavery or restrict its growth.
Con: Only three Democrats — Van Buren, Grover Cleveland, and Jimmy Carter — have ever been voted out of office, although three others (Joe Biden, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan) avoided that fate only because they were in various ways jettisoned by the party. The voters weren’t wrong to conclude that the Jackson/Van Buren Democrats needed to go after twelve years.
It can be hard to fairly rank presidents based upon their Native American policy. The big picture of that policy, in which the nation’s settled lands expanded at the continual expense of the tribes, continued unabated from George Washington’s administration through the end of the 19th century regardless of the good or bad faith of any president. The whole arc of our history is impossible to rerun if that had gone differently. That said, the Van Buren years saw an especially bleak period of force and fraud used to continue Andrew Jackson’s policies of driving as many of the tribes as possible out of the lands east of the Mississippi.
11. Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69)
Like Van Buren, LBJ was at heart a partisan wire-puller rather than a statesman. In contrast to Van Buren, LBJ’s was a big presidency, rich in accomplishments both good and bad with lasting impacts on the country.
Pro: Johnson’s finest hour was his decisive turn from a leader of anti-civil-rights filibusters in the Senate to the gravitational force that helped the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 get enacted. True, both laws had flaws that have been exacerbated over time by judicial and administrative creativity in interpretation, but dramatic federal action was necessary to break the century-long hold of Jim Crow on the South. And true, LBJ read the writing on the wall that by the mid-1960s, his party could probably gain as many votes from black voters and Northern liberals as it would lose in the South from doing so. It was nonetheless a courageous leap in the dark to turn decisively away from the political formula that had bound the South to the Democrats for a century.
Like Truman and Kennedy, Johnson was a staunch anti-communist. He oversaw the hardening of the East-West lines in Europe and sought to resist communist expansion in Southeast Asia. The Vietnam War was fought for a noble cause. How LBJ went about prosecuting it, however, was a national tragedy.
Con: Johnson’s Great Society, taken as a whole, expanded federal spending and bureaucracy far out of proportion to what it accomplished — and that’s before even considering the ways in which it actively did more harm than good to its beneficiaries. His guns-and-butter budgetary policies lay at the original root of the stagflation crisis of the 1970s. His Supreme Court appointments were cronyist and ended in a corruption scandal and a bipartisan filibuster. His immigration policy remains rightly controversial.
It was Vietnam that ate the LBJ presidency alive, turning his liberal and New Left supporters against him and fracturing the landslide anti-Goldwater coalition he briefly assembled in 1964. However just the cause, there should never have been half a million Americans on the ground in Vietnam by 1968. America didn’t lose the war on the battlefield — but it shouldn’t have been pouring vast numbers of conscripted men into a war that could not be won on the battlefield, either.
12. Andrew Jackson (1829–37)
Jackson, once the hero of every Democrat who wished to posture as the defender of the common man, is now persona non grata in his own party’s history (hence the demise of the annual Jefferson-Jackson dinners), but has been adopted by Donald Trump. Jackson’s greatest services to his nation came in the field of battle. For conservatives, his presidency is no golden age.
The concept of a “Jacksonian” foreign policy really derives more from his pre-presidential dealings with Native American tribes and Spain than from his presidential foreign policy. The Jackson administration’s foreign policy initiatives were largely low-key but included covert support for the Texas revolution.
Jackson asserted the president’s primacy over every employee of the executive branch. He dubbed this “rotation in office,” and he saw it as a populist cure for the accretion of permanent power in permanent civil servants. He was right to assert that constitutional power, but it was Jackson’s nakedly self-interested partisanship in distributing federal offices that plagued the executive power for the next half century and triggered the backlash of civil service reforms in the 1880s. It became known as the “spoils system” after William Marcy (then a senator from New York, and later Franklin Pierce’s secretary of state) coined the phrase, “To the victor go the spoils.”
Pro: Jackson was a patriot and nationalist down to his bones, having bled for his country since he was a prisoner of war in his early teens in the Revolution. His finest hour was when he stared down his erstwhile Vice President John C. Calhoun over Calhoun’s insistence that South Carolina could unilaterally nullify federal law and secede if its right to do so was denied. Jackson’s proclamation against nullification, which he wrote in such a white heat that Jackson had to leave the pages out to dry separately, is an American creed for the ages:
The laws of the United States must be executed. I have no discretionary power on the subject—my duty is emphatically pronounced in the Constitution. Those who told you that you might peaceably prevent their execution, deceived you. . . . They know that a forcible opposition could alone prevent the execution of the laws, and they know that such opposition must be repelled. Their object is disunion, but be not deceived by names; disunion, by armed force, is TREASON.
Are you really ready to incur its guilt? If you are, on the head of the instigators of the act be the dreadful consequences—on their heads be the dishonor, but on yours may fall the punishment—on your unhappy State will inevitably fall all the evils of the conflict you force upon the government of your country. It cannot accede to the mad project of disunion, of which you would be the first victims—its first magistrate cannot, if he would, avoid the performance of his duty—the consequence must be fearful for you, distressing to your fellow-citizens here, and to the friends of good government throughout the world.
Its enemies have beheld our prosperity with a vexation they could not conceal–it was a standing refutation of their slavish doctrines, and they will point to our discord with the triumph of malignant joy. It is yet in your power to disappoint them. . . . You may disturb [the United States’] peace—you may interrupt the course of its prosperity—you may cloud its reputation for stability—but its tranquillity will be restored, its prosperity will return, and the stain upon its national character will be transferred and remain an eternal blot on the memory of those who caused the disorder.
Fellow-citizens of the United States! the threat of unhallowed disunion . . . denote the approach of a crisis in our affairs on which the continuance of our unexampled prosperity, our political existence, and perhaps that of all free governments, may depend. . . . I rely with equal confidence on your undivided support in my determination to execute the laws—to preserve the Union by all constitutional means—to arrest, if possible, by moderate but firm measures, the necessity of a recourse to force; and, if it be the will of Heaven that the recurrence of its primeval curse on man for the shedding of a brother’s blood should fall upon our land, that it be not called down by any offensive act on the part of the United States.
In private, Jackson was even blunter, telling a visiting South Carolina congressman: “Please give my compliments to my friends in your state. And say to them, that if a single drop of blood shall be shed there in opposition to the laws of the United States, I will hang the first man I can lay my hand on engaged in such treasonable conduct, upon the first tree I can reach.” All the way to the Civil War, Jackson’s old friends (such as Francis Blair and Sam Houston) stood against breaking up the union.
Jackson is typically credited with the movement to extend the franchise universally (among white men, the electorate of the day) without regard to property qualifications. That was more a matter of his political movement than his exercise of presidential powers, but he was nonetheless an emblem of the common man’s place in politics.
Con: Jackson was really the first imperial president; the Whigs took their name from the British party that was resisting the power of the throne in the mid-1830s. His approach to the spoils of office laid down the roots of the Democratic Party’s organization around special interest clients, today “the groups.” (Jay Cost’s 2012 book Spoiled Rotten traces this legacy.) His “Trail of Tears” Native American policy was brutal even by the standards of its day. His war against the Second Bank of the United States wrecked the economy in the Panic of 1837. He put Roger Taney, a close aide and holder of two key cabinet posts in his administration, on the Supreme Court, where Taney went on to write Dred Scott.
Jackson was impressive as an action hero, but in office he could have used more of Washington’s virtues of restraint.
13. Barack Obama (2009–17)
In a way, it feels easier to close the historical book on Joe Biden’s presidency than that of his old boss. Biden’s failures were immediate and obvious; his accomplishments, such as they were, are mostly fleeting; his political coalition dissolved in his fingers. Obama, we are still unwinding.
Pro: Obama’s place in history was secured by his very identity as the first black president. His actual finest hour was the raid in Pakistan that got Osama bin Laden, on which he overruled Joe Biden’s advice not to go. He resisted as well Biden’s efforts to get him to abandon Afghanistan, although in eight years of war there, he never did figure out a strategy (in fairness, neither did George W. Bush or Donald Trump). He was, in contrast to Biden and Bill Clinton, a good family man who didn’t treat federal office like a family piggy bank.
Con: Elected largely to deal with a financial crisis, Obama simply slapped another useless layer of regulation on the banking system through Dodd-Frank and the unconstitutional monstrosity of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and instead plunged the nation into years of political warfare over his overly complex health-care reorganization. Nine years after he left office, many of the moving parts of the original Obamacare design have been repealed, eviscerated, or struck down by courts, but the parts that survived have come nowhere close to satisfying American health-care consumers.
It was in foreign affairs that Obama really set America back. He tried to completely abandon Iraq, only to have to send troops back when ISIS took over vast swaths of the country. He bent his second-term foreign policy toward propping up Iran at the expense of Israel. He blundered into a war in Libya without a clear idea of what kind of government he was helping install. Beginning his term with blandishments about a “reset” with Russia and “more flexibility” in his second term while mocking Mitt Romney’s tough-on-Moscow talk with the sneer “the Eighties called; they want their foreign policy back,” he offered only tepid resistance when Vladimir Putin seized Crimea from Ukraine. He oversaw the high-water mark of American complacency on China while cravenly begging the People’s Republic for illusory climate concessions.
After Democrats lost the House in 2010, Obama also marked the hard turn toward governance by executive fiat — as he famously quipped, “I have a pen and a phone” — and away from legislative lawmaking. He openly browbeat the Supreme Court justices for rulings he didn’t like and threatened worse if they struck down Obamacare. He took legal actions, such as on immigration, after openly admitting that he lacked the legal authority to take them. His hard focus on culture war and the politics of demographic division, especially in his 2012 reelection campaign and his second term, was a major factor in deranging the country’s politics.
14. Jimmy Carter (1977–81)
Probably no other president since Herbert Hoover has been so widely recognized as a failure by those who lived through his presidency as Carter. Only a 44-year post-presidency helped soften his reputation.
Pro: I recently covered the highlights of Carter’s presidency, which included the Camp David accords, significant deregulation, and a number of steps to fight communism and inflation that helped lay the groundwork upon which the Reagan Revolution was built.
Con: Carter’s presidency, in spite of his occasional positive contributions, was a flop. He sold himself in 1976 as more moderate than he really was and became an icon of muddle-headed weakness who had Americans almost ready to believe that no one man could handle the presidency. The economy spun out of control with high inflation, gas shortages, and high unemployment. The nation went in headlong retreat around the world, as Carter’s initial efforts to cut the defense budget and appease the Soviet Union were massive failures. America appeared powerless to do anything as Islamic radicals held our embassy staff hostage in Iran, the Red Army poured into Afghanistan, and communism was on the march throughout Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. An expansion of the circuit courts let Carter stock the judiciary with terrible judges; mercifully, he never got a Supreme Court appointment.
15. Joe Biden (2021–25)
The Biden presidency’s failures are still fresh enough in our memories to require only a limited summary, yet his disappearance in the final months and the monsoon of activity from the Trump restoration make Biden’s presidency seem years ago, rather than something that ended last month.
Pro: Biden came to office in good part on the basis of his reputation as a moderate institutionalist, with a pro-American foreign policy and a sensible approach to issues like crime. That was always a myth, but every now and then its vestiges reasserted themselves. If Biden wasn’t as strong a friend of Ukraine or Israel as he sometimes pretended, he was never willing to abandon either entirely to their fate, as he had done in the past to Afghanistan, Iraq, and South Vietnam. His rhetorical support for the Ukrainian cause at least kept his party united on that front. He presided over a bipartisan hardening of the consensus for confronting China, including maintaining Trump tariffs and signing the TikTok ban.
Con: Biden was the first man to hold the office as an octogenarian, and his entire presidency was a fraud on the public, a pretense that he was in charge and up to the job. His abandonment of Afghanistan was a shambolic disgrace that shocked and alienated our allies and left good men to die in the field. It also set the international tone that was taken by Russia and Hamas as a green light — in Russia’s case, after Biden’s infamous gaffe suggesting that we might look the other way at a “minor incursion” by Russia into Ukraine.
His self-inflicted wounds were many, starting with a migrant crisis created by immigration policies that nobody would defend or even acknowledge by the end of his term. Biden misread both his mandate and the economic situation by pouring new federal spending into an economy facing post-pandemic inflation — and tried to do worse by proposing $6 trillion in new spending — $46,321.17 per household, more in one year than the entire cost of the Second World War. His administration ignored both science and the needs of the American people by prolonging pandemic restrictions unnecessarily, especially in-person school closures.
He repeatedly burst the restraints of the Constitution on his office: He issued a national mandate to vaccinate American workers, seized control of local apartment leases to ban evictions, forgave half a trillion in student loans with money not appropriated by Congress, and threatened to start issuing debt not backed by Congress — all but the last of which were blocked by the courts. His Justice Department abused the law to try to jail political opponents and whistleblowers and wage culture war against state governments. He was the first president to have a member of his cabinet get impeached and refuse to resign. In the end, he joined Carter and Donald Trump as the only presidents since 1900 to take the White House from the other party, start off with his party holding both houses of Congress, and end by giving all three back to the other party in four years.
16. Franklin Pierce (1853–57)
The most thoroughly partisan figure ever to attain the presidency, Pierce repeated Monroe’s trick of breaking the opposing party so badly it died. But what he actually accomplished set both his own party and the nation on the glide path to fatal schisms.
Pro: Pierce, unlike his successor, ran an honest ship and a harmonious one; his was the only cabinet to remain unchanged for the president’s full presidential term. He had some administrative successes, such as his attorney general laying the groundwork for the management of law enforcement that would become the Department of Justice in 1870. He aspired to a presidency focused on foreign affairs, but among the two great foreign policy successes of Pierce’s term, one (the opening of Japan) resulted from an expedition already set to sea by his predecessor, and the other (the Gadsden Purchase) accomplished only its most minimal aims while triggering the collapse of Mexico’s government, with consequences that would cascade into the French effort to conquer Mexico six years later.
Con: Of all the steps toward the Civil War, the biggest was the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. By overturning the Missouri Compromise in allowing slavery north of its line of demarcation, Kansas-Nebraska instantly destroyed the basis for any further compromises across partisan or regional lines. Leading Southern Whigs supported the bill, bringing the party to an end. Northern Democrats were divided, and those who were strong-armed into supporting it almost uniformly lost their offices at the next election. In all but eliminating both existing parties as national organizations, it reorganized the country around regional antagonisms and gave rise to the Republican Party.
The bill, whose underlying purpose was to organize the Kansas and Nebraska territories for settlement and (more importantly) railroad construction, was the brainchild of Stephen A. Douglas. Douglas, in turn, was prodded by Southern Democrats into gradually amending the bill to make plain not only its conflict with the Missouri Compromise but also its immediate permission to bring slaves into the territory before statehood. The resulting and predictable outcome of opening Kansas to “popular sovereignty” in which the side with the most votes could decide the slave or free status of the territory was partisan warfare and massive election fraud — “Bleeding Kansas.”
Pierce’s choice to support Douglas’s bill was the fateful step that turned this from merely a proposal to a national priority. Douglas, aware that Pierce sometimes gave verbal assurances that he later backed out of, had the president personally write out in longhand the section of the bill killing the Missouri Compromise. While historians debate the true motives of the New Hampshirite Pierce in committing to the Douglas bill, the unflattering consensus is that one of his major reasons for doing so was simply that he needed a partisan conflict to keep his own coalition from unraveling over festering disputes about patronage. Already sitting on a broad majorities in Congress and the Electoral College, Pierce was willing to roll the dice with the survival of the country just to secure the position of his party — which he then promptly lost. What could be more dishonorable? (Don’t answer that; we’re not done yet.)
Pierce made other mistakes as well. He let “bleeding Kansas” bleed without exercising federal force to restore order. His ministers to Europe (including James Buchanan, whom he sent abroad to keep him out of domestic politics) created an international incident with the Ostend Manifesto openly itching for the seizure of Cuba. In his last desperate throes, he blessed William Walker’s American filibuster government in Nicaragua.
17. Woodrow Wilson (1913–21)
I hardly need repeat my extensive case against Wilson, as laid out in my Hater’s Guide to Woodrow Wilson (more here, here, here, and here). Wilson wasn’t just bad; he was bad in ways that have cast a long shadow over our politics ever since. He is a clock we have never been able to wind backward.
Pro: Wilson exhaled carbon dioxide, which is needed by plants.
Con: I’ll stick here to the short version. Wilson gave us progressive innovations such as the “living Constitution” and the administrative state. He segregated the federal government, screened a pro-Klan film at the White House, and interned German-Americans during the First World War, laying the groundwork for Japanese internment in the Second. He engaged in mass censorship and many other civil liberties abuses, hired J. Edgar Hoover, and mishandled a pandemic. He left us the income tax, the Federal Reserve, daylight saving time, and the Jones Act. He threw a presidential opponent in jail for dissent. Our first Ph.D. president, he was an admirer of the governments of Prussia and the Confederacy (in which he grew up) and introduced the academic hothouse to American government. His rigid, moralistic foreign policy not only led us into the First World War immediately after he ran for reelection on staying out of it, but helped lay the groundwork for the disastrous Treaty of Versailles and the ineffectual League of Nations, the latter of which he could not get Americans to join. He may have put the first Jewish justice, Louis Brandeis on the Supreme Court, but he saddled him with a colleague (Wilson’s former attorney general) so antisemitic that he would leave the room when Brandeis was speaking. He left behind runaway inflation and rising violence against black Americans. Oh, and like Biden, his last two years in office entailed a huge fraud on Americans as an ailing Wilson ceded governance to his second wife.
18. James Buchanan (1857–61)
As much as both Wilson and Pierce richly deserve to come in last — and at the risk of imperiling my claim to be the nation’s foremost Wilson-hater (a crowded field) — when it comes to failed presidencies, it’s hard to top leaving the country plunging into a civil war led by the president’s own party.
Pro: The pro-Buchanan case is, basically, more in the nature of apologetics: that things were already out of control when he took over, that he was never personally in favor of secession, and that he actually believed that he was staving off the dissolution of the country. He stood up for America abroad in a confrontation with Paraguay. The list is short.
Con: Buchanan, an incurable schemer since his days as Polk’s secretary of state and Pierce’s ambassador to Britain, ran an administration shot through with corruption. More consequentially, while Buchanan was a Pennsylvanian, he bent over backward to appease the Slave Power. He set the tone before he was even sworn in by conspiring to pressure Supreme Court justices to join the Dred Scott decision purporting to constitutionally settle the question of slavery in the territories — and using his inaugural address to demand that Americans accept a decision that hadn’t been issued yet, but whose contents he knew. When Buchanan tried to get Congress to accept the admission of Kansas under the fraudulently procured pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution, even that indefatigable apologist Douglas broke with Buchanan. When Buchanan cited the example of senators who did not survive conflicts with Andrew Jackson and warned Douglas, “I desire you to remember that no Democrat ever yet differed from an administration of his own choice without being crushed,” Douglas replied, “Mr. President, I wish you to remember that General Jackson is dead, sir.”
With the fate of the nation on the line, Douglas rose to the occasion in the 1860 presidential campaign, driving himself to an early grave with a tireless speaking tour begging Democrats to turn from the siren song of secession. Buchanan refused to raise a finger to help him. By the end, as Southern states declared their separation from the union in the terrible winter of 1860–61, Buchanan was lamely arguing that he had no power to do anything about secession and counting the days until he could dump the problem in Abraham Lincoln’s lap — while Buchanan’s own secretary of war, John Floyd, was moving military assets into position to help the Confederacy.
Buchanan’s presidency wasn’t quite treason. But it was the next best thing.