Not the Worst

I disagree with with Myron Magnet’s assertion in City Journal that Barack Obama is the worst president in American history:

But unlike Lincoln, America’s first black president didn’t bind up the nation’s wounds but scratched them open every time police killed a black man—rightly or sometimes wrongly, because when society arms men with guns and authority, it will inevitably attract some bullies, making a police chief responsible for policing his own men vigilantly, as the NYPD especially has striven to do, and as Plato told us was statecraft’s thorniest problem. Anytime a non-black man killed an African-American, Obama cried racism and said it could have been him or his son, if he’d had one. Every time a cop, white or black, killed a black American, Obama’s reflexive instinct was to blame the cop. About the mayhem of black-on-black murder in the nation’s ghettoes, he gave only a single speech.

When the president praises the Black Lives Matter demonstrators, as if they alone of his fellow countrymen know that platitudinous truth, he is only reinforcing black grievance, when his proper role is to convince ghetto blacks that their lives matter enough for them to take responsibility for them, to stop going around with chips on their shoulders and Glocks in their waistbands, to be fathers to the children they beget, and to set for them an example of the responsible citizenship that is theirs for the asking, thanks to the efforts of so many of their countrymen, white and black, living and dead.

I’m willing to cut the president more slack than that. I think that President Obama has a very bad habit of musing in public, something that’s acceptable in a college professor but problematic for a president of the United States. He intervenes in local matters that don’t really concern him and, sadly, frequently speaks before engaging his intellect. Instinctively, he reacts in such a way as to consolidate his political base, even at the expense of greater, more laudable goals.

But there’s just too much competition for the title of “worst president”. William Henry Harrison, Warren G. Harding, Andrew Johnson, and, notably, George W. Bush are frequently mentioned as contenders. I think that President Obama’s record pales in comparison with the turpidity of Harding or the damage of Andrew Johnson. As to George W. Bush, I think it’s too early to tell. He could be a contender.