America's Three Most Overrated Presidents

If you are a liberal Democrat, be forewarned, because I am about to filet some of your sacred cows and eat them for lunch.

Yes, that means that sitting atop my list of the three most overrated presidents is the high priest of liberalism himself, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Dale, you can’t be serious! Didn’t FDR successfully navigate America through the Great Depression and almost all of World War II?

Yes and no. From my vantagepoint, Roosevelt actually prolonged the Great Depression by printing and then spending money we didn’t have. Maybe some of his heavy-handed methods were necessary in 1933, but FDR certainly could have taken his foot off the gas by 1935 or 1936 at the latest. Instead, he put the pedal to the metal throughout the 1930s, doubling the national debt from $20 billion when he took office to $40 billion by the end of the decade.

By the time Roosevelt died in office in 1945, our national debt had increased more than six-fold to a whopping $259 billion, largely due to the costs of fighting a World War on two different fronts. It has only dipped below that total four times since (thank you, Harry Truman).

FDR was also caught napping when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor despite some early warning signs that were almost too numerous to miss. If the U.S. Navy had only had its ships out to sea – or at least not lined up side-by-side – we wouldn’t have had to rebuild much of our Pacific fleet from scratch.

The final nail in Roosevelt’s coffin was his ill-fated and clearly unconstitutional attempt to pack the Supreme Court with liberal judges. That outrageous move had all the markings of a rich little kid getting annoyed because Mumsy wouldn’t buy him the latest and most expensive toy in the store.

Speaking of liberals who grew the size of government exponentially, Lyndon Johnson did everything is his power to make FDR look like a miser. Supposedly, everything is bigger in Texas and so, LBJ tried his best to prove it. Go big or go home, right Lyndon?

Although the national debt didn’t increase that much while he was in office, growing from $306 billion to $354 billion, Johnson’s Great Society set the table for the record deficits we have today. Economists predict that entitlements such as Medicare, Medicaid, SNAP, and other welfare programs will soon consume the vast majority of our federal budget, leaving some terribly hard choices for our children and grandchildren to make as they become the first generation of Americans to experience a lower standard of living than their parents.

Add Johnson’s mishandling of Vietnam and the inner-city race riots in Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit and elsewhere, and you can make a strong case that LBJ was in over his head.

Which brings us to Barack Obama, Mr. Community Organizer himself. Aside from forcing Americans to buy a product or service or be fined for the first time in U.S. history (see Obamacare), our 44th president was an economic and foreign policy disaster. If the Republicans hadn’t run John McCain, a past-his-expiration-date candidate, in 2008… and the rich and robotic Mitt Romney in 2012… maybe America could have been spared Benghazi, Fast and Furious, the Russian invasion of Crimea, and Obama’s multiple red lines in the sand.

Billed as the Great Unifier, President Obama became the Great Divider as he fanned the racial flames in America for his own political purposes. What an egregiously wasted opportunity for our country’s first black president! As Gomer Pyle would have said, “Shame, shame, shame.”

Likewise, Mr. Style Over Substance should be embarrassed by his stewardship of the economy. After calling our $8 trillion debt “unpatriotic” in 2008, he left office having more than doubled that astronomical figure.

Although he narrowly missed making our list, Woodrow Wilson deserves a shout-out for introducing the federal income tax and for being so vain and power-hungry that – even when he was almost completely incapacitated by a paralyzing stroke – he refused to relinquish the presidency to his vice president, Thomas Marshall. Instead, his wife Edith served as America’s unelected and de facto Chief Executive for the last two years of his second term.

So, there you have it, folks. A grouping of very undistinguished and extremely overrated presidents whom America would have done better without. I rank them as follows: FDR – in the high teens; LBJ – in the high twenties; and Obama – in the high thirties.