REAGAN WAS THE WORST

REAGAN WAS THE WORST! In the lead-up to the 1980 national election between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan , popular media had dubbed Carter as "our most ineffectual postwar President," presumably meaning the Civil War. While my favorable regard for Carter's Presidency substantially plummeted, following his decision to boycott the 1980 Moscow Olympics , I still thought that the popular estimation of him was too harsh. Having studied the matter more closely since 1980, I now conclude that the popular punditry was wrong. The choices for most ineffectual U.S. President since the Civil War are ample. Given the paucity of good ones--like Lyndon Johnson, Harry Truman, and Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt--my pick for the worst three are: Rutherford B. Hayes, Woodrow Wilson, & Ronald Reagan. Rutherford B. Hayes, in order to become President, sold his soul to the conniving devil. He betrayed the Constitution, federal law, and the Republican Party's dutiful blacks, by capitulating to capitalist pressures to abandon Reconstruction in the South following the closely contested election of 1876. His rich Republican Party leaders' back room bargain with the Democrats of Samuel Tilden hooked him in the nose like a pig. Woodrow Wilson ranks near the bottom, because he was an ardent racist, viewing "Birth of A Nation" in the White House; invading Haiti, outlawing black hiring in the federal government, imposing the income tax; installing the privately owned federal reserve system, and being a supporter of the Klu Klux Klan. Ronald Reagan was very inept, nearly senile in office, which, in the end, was run by his wife, Nancy, and her team of handlers. Reagan was the movie image, "the Gipper," the electable puppet of "conservative" corporate interests, which assailed the freedom of trial lawyers, by implementing rules that sanctioned them monetarily for perceived breaches of those same rules by racist federal judges he had appointed. Reagan also cut back on federal aid to cities and for student loans, both of which affected blacks adversely, disproportionately as planned. And he launched the "War on Drugs, when drug use was declining to double-down on vulnerable urban blacks, and its accompanying apparatus: civil and criminal forfeitures and mandatory minimum sentence. He also ridiculed and gutted affirmative action efforts. So, for me, while I detest all three: Hayes, Wilson, and Reagan, Ronald Reagan ranks as the worst President since the Civil War. What say you?