Barack Obama will be remembered as one of the greatest presidents of all time, according to Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Bill Clinton and longtime Democratic consultant. But where does that rank in comparison to other presidents, and how does he stack up against other presidents in terms of accomplishments and impact on the nation's economic and social well-being? In this episode, we'll take a look at how Obama stacks up against the other presidents of his time, including George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan. We'll also talk about how he stacks up in comparison with other presidents and how he compares to the other two-term presidents, George H.W. Bush and Richard Nixon, who are two of the most successful presidents in American history, and John F. Kennedy, who was the first African-American to become president and the first man to serve two terms in the White House. And, of course, we ll talk about what makes a good president and a bad president, and where he ranks in the pantheon of greats. President Obama ranks in that list. Thanks for listening and tweet us if you liked this episode! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What makes a great president? 2:30 - Who was the worst? 3:40 - Where does Obama stack up historically? 4:00 5: Where does he rank against other Presidents? 6: How does Obama rank among other presidents? 7: Who was better? 8:20 - What would you rank higher than Obama? 9:10 - What are you would like to see him rank higher? 10: How will he rank? 11:00 -- Who is a better president than Carter? 13:30 -- What makes him better than Nixon? 14:40 -- Who would you put him in your top-tier? 15:20 -- What does he have the most impact on American history? 16:10 -- Where would you like him? 17:10 What s the worst president you'd like him to be next? 18:40 19: What s his legacy? 21:00-- What would he rank in your favorite? 22:00 Obama s greatest accomplishments? 27:30 Is he better than Carter or Obama s? 26:30 Is he the best? 23:30 Does he have more impact?
00:00:00.000According to Lanny Davis, former special counsel to President Clinton and longtime Democratic consultant, Barack Obama will be considered one of history's great presidents.
00:00:10.000Well, according to Davis, to be a great president requires a combination of four factors.
00:00:13.000First, unique circumstances making a major impact on the nation's history, like Washington and Jefferson as framers and setting important precedents for the presidency for future generations.
00:01:13.000Obama did face a severe economic downturn when he assumed office.
00:01:17.000That is not that rare in American history.
00:01:19.000According to 247wallstreet.com, America has had either depressions or recessions.
00:01:23.000In 1797 under Adams, 1807 under Jefferson, 1815 to 1821 under Madison and Monroe.
00:01:29.0001837 under Van Buren, 1857 under Buchanan, 1873 under Grant, 1893 under Cleveland, 1907 under Teddy, 1920 and 21 under Harding, the Great Depression under Hoover and FDR, 1973 under Nixon, and the Carter years and early Reagan years.
00:01:42.000Which leaves aside the stock market crashes under Reagan, the mild economic downturn under George H.W.
00:01:46.000Bush, and the bursting of the internet bubble under Bill Clinton.
00:01:49.000So, the question isn't, did he actually experience a downturn, it's what he did with that.
00:01:54.000He proceeded to lead, Obama did, one of the worst recoveries in American history.
00:01:58.000Second, successfully addressing one or more national crises.
00:02:02.000Davis gives Obama credit for addressing the Great Recession, although his recovery was tepid at best, actually the worst since the Great Depression.
00:02:09.000Average annual growth has been the weakest since 1949, at just 2.1% growth per year.
00:02:14.000The expansion has been long, but it's been seriously underproductive.
00:02:17.000On foreign policy, Obama has exacerbated national crises surrounding terror, presided over a massive increase in the number of terror attacks on American soil.
00:02:25.000He's also presided over the collapse of race relations in the United States.
00:02:29.000When he took office, two out of three Americans thought race relations were good.
00:02:32.000He leaves office with nearly two in three Americans thinking precisely the reverse.
00:02:37.000A good president has significant impacts on domestic reform policy.
00:02:40.000Obama's biggest domestic policy achievement, Obamacare, has increased costs and premiums, thrown Americans off their preferred insurance plans, and separated them from their doctors, all while overburdening medical care providers and placing insurance companies under the financial gun.
00:02:54.000It will be repealed as soon as Obama's gone.
00:02:56.000His immigration policy has left millions of illegal immigrants adrift.
00:02:59.000His foreign policy has been a series of appeasements and blunders resulting in the rise of ISIS, a genocide in Syria, the unilateral surrender of Iraq, the incompetent prosecution of the war in Afghanistan, the regional empowerment and global legitimization of the Iranian terror regime, the creation of a dictatorship in Turkey, the empowerment of a dictatorship in Russia, the expansion of Chinese power.
00:03:17.000He's weakened American allies all around the globe.
00:03:20.000Fourth factor, enhancing the future of the presidency and his political party.
00:03:24.000The presidency is more powerful now than it was under Obama's predecessors, but that's not a particularly good measure of greatness since he'll be handing over that power to Donald Trump.
00:03:33.000And Obama has devastated his political party.
00:03:35.000He's lost nearly a thousand seats across the country for his party.
00:03:38.000His party controls just 18 governorships.
00:03:40.000He's lost the Senate, he's lost the House, he's lost the White House.
00:03:42.000The Democrats are in the weakest position they've occupied since 1920 on the state level.
00:03:47.000And no, Barack Obama doesn't just get extra credit because he's black.
00:03:50.000So, where does Obama stack up historically?
00:03:52.000It's actually kind of rare that historians rank two-term presidents among the nation's worst.
00:03:56.000The only two-term president often included in that list is W, and that's largely due to the economic collapse of 2007-2008.
00:04:03.000If not for that, he'd probably be somewhere in the middle.
00:04:05.000In all likelihood, Obama will rank slightly above Jimmy Carter, but below Richard Nixon.
00:04:09.000Historians will probably place him above George W., but well below Bill Clinton or even LBJ.
00:04:14.000He'll rank as a rotten president, not the worst ever, but certainly not among the best.
00:05:31.000Everybody in the office has tried them, which is why the production quality has suffered on days we have wine tastings here at the office because they all get drunk and they're more useless than usual.
00:05:42.000And again, if you don't know what bottle of wine to bring to a party, or you're just looking for a bottle of wine with your dinner, and you don't know anything about wine, and you're looking for a solid wine at a really great price, then trywink.com is where you need to go.
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00:06:14.000So you get fine wine personalized to you at trywink.com slash Ben, and if you're ready to celebrate the inauguration, or you're ready to lament the inauguration, or you're ready to just drink, trywink.com slash Ben is the place to go.
00:06:54.000We'll go through his final press conference and savor every last minute of angst and upset that Barack Obama can leverage.
00:07:02.000First, I do have to note, Donald Trump
00:07:04.000Today, he's headed to Washington, D.C.
00:07:06.000to prepare for the inauguration, which happens tomorrow.
00:07:08.000This time tomorrow, if you're listening right now, by this time tomorrow, Donald Trump will be not president-elect, he'll be president of the United States.
00:07:14.000And there's pictures of him getting off the military jet with Melania and saluting the troops, which is nice, because you feel like he actually likes the troops as opposed to the president we currently have in office.
00:07:26.000If you're watching Donald Trump, the guy from The Apprentice, become President of the United States, and you don't feel at least a little bit of trepidation about that, it's because you're not watching closely enough.
00:07:35.000And I'm going to talk a little bit later about what we can expect from Trump, and what our hopes should be, and what we should actually look for from Donald Trump.
00:08:31.000Barack Obama has been disastrous president of the United States.
00:08:35.000What's amazing is watching as Democrats struggle with this, CNN ran a story desperately hoping that Donald Trump would actually be assassinated, really.
00:08:42.000Because they hoped that if he were assassinated and the rest of the cabinet that Trump has picked were assassinated, they haven't actually been voted on yet.
00:08:50.000If you assassinate Trump and you assassinate Pence, then right now, as it goes, Barack Obama remains, he's still the president today.
00:08:57.000So if he killed Trump and Pence today, this is seriously what CNN reported.
00:09:00.000Here is what the CNN report looked like.
00:09:02.000And while officials stress there's no specific credible threat to this inauguration, tonight, due to a quirk in America's rules for succession, questions remain about just who would be in charge if an attack hit the incoming president, vice president, and congressional leaders just as the transfer of power is underway.
00:09:20.000Here you have a very confusing line of succession.
00:09:22.000According to the Constitution, if the President and Vice President are killed or incapacitated, next in line is the House Speaker, then the President pro tempore of the Senate.
00:09:32.000But what if something happened to them at the inauguration, too?
00:09:35.000After that, it goes down the list of cabinet secretaries, starting with Secretary of State.
00:09:40.000On the day of the inauguration, as a precaution, a cabinet secretary called the Designated Presidential Successor will not attend the inauguration, ready to step in if something happens.
00:09:50.000But it won't be a Trump cabinet secretary, since none of them have been confirmed yet.
00:09:58.000So if Obama and Biden were killed, and then if Trump and Pence were killed before the inauguration, it would have to happen before the inauguration, right?
00:10:06.000They're basically saying, well, you know what could happen, theoretically, what if Trump and Pence died, and Obama and Biden died, John Kerry would become president.
00:10:14.000I mean, this is like, this is insanity.
00:10:16.000So they're now living in this crazy fantasy world.
00:10:19.000And let's face it, okay, everyone's in some sort of bizarre fever dream here, because there was a story today that Donald Trump at the inauguration might dance with Caitlyn Jenner.
00:10:25.000Okay, I'm just gonna say, I don't know what the hell is going on.
00:10:29.000If that actually happens, well I guess that would be kind of a fitting capstone to 2016 when nothing made any sense and we're pretty much living inside God's burp right now, but...
00:10:40.000Let's just focus for a second, instead of getting into the Trump stuff, which is a lot of fun, let's focus on something else fun, which is Barack Obama leaving.
00:11:36.000The reason that we are the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote is... So President Obama on his way out, he's still riffing on Jim Crow, which ended in the 1960s.
00:11:51.000And in talking about how voting rights are being impinged.
00:11:54.000He still cannot name a single instance in which a black person has been turned away from the polls illegitimately.
00:11:58.000He still can't name a single instance of that across the country.
00:12:01.000So while the left claims that voter fraud has never happened and will never happen without any evidence, they also claim that there's an attempt, a market attempt to get black people to stop voting.
00:12:10.000Which again has no evidence to support it.
00:12:13.000Barack Obama is asked specifically about Julian Assange because yesterday he released Chelsea Manning, the WikiLeaks traitor.
00:12:21.000And so he's asked about Julian Assange, and here was Obama's answer about Assange.
00:12:26.000I don't pay a lot of attention to Mr. Assange's tweets, so that wasn't a consideration in this instance.
00:12:33.000And I'd refer you to the Justice Department for
00:12:37.000Uh, any criminal investigations, indictments, extradition issues, uh, that may come up.
00:12:43.000...doesn't pay any attention to Assange's tweets except for the fact that he thinks that WikiLeaks affected the election, and Julian Assange is the head of WikiLeaks, so there's that as well.
00:12:50.000Obama also couldn't leave without riffing on race and talking about how America's racially divided.
00:12:54.000It's more racially divided than when he took office because he blew his opportunity as the first black president to bring everybody together, instead using race-baiting as a political tool and tactic.
00:13:03.000Here's Barack Obama on race relations as he leaves.
00:13:07.000And by the way, it's no longer a black and white issue alone.
00:13:11.000You've got Hispanic folks and you've got Asian folks.
00:13:15.000This is not just the same old battles.
00:13:23.000We've got this stew that's bubbling up of people from everywhere.
00:13:34.000Again, he's now trying to make race relations more complicated on his way out, just as he has during his administration.
00:13:40.000He also defended his commutation of Chelsea Manning's prison sentence, his decision to free the person who was responsible for leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks, which resulted in the endangerment of American soldiers and American allies.
00:13:54.000Here's Obama defending that yesterday.
00:15:08.000I mean, when you're talking about Chelsea Manning having served this really, really harsh sentence, it was a 35-year sentence.
00:15:12.000Chelsea Manning served 7 to 8 years and was given hormone treatments by the federal government because Chelsea Manning thinks he is a woman.
00:15:19.000Barack Obama then frees Chelsea Manning and we're supposed to believe that that doesn't send a signal to leakers that you're basically going to get away with it?
00:15:27.000The most laugh-worthy line of all of this, though, was when Barack Obama starts talking to the press.
00:15:31.000Because this is just, this is just... If you don't spit your coffee listening to this line, it's only because you're not drinking coffee.
00:18:56.000is the only major country on earth that does not guarantee health care to all people as a right.
00:19:02.000Canada does it, every major country in Europe does it.
00:19:06.000Do you believe that health care is a right of all Americans, whether they're rich or they're poor?
00:19:13.000Should people, because they are Americans, be able to go to the doctor when they need to, be able to go into a hospital because they are Americans?
00:19:24.000No, we're not a compassionate society.
00:19:25.000In terms of our relationship to poor and working people, our record is worse than virtually any other country on earth.
00:19:31.000We have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any other major country on earth.
00:19:35.000And half of our senior older workers have nothing set aside for retirement.
00:19:40.000So I don't think, compared to other countries, we are particularly compassionate.
00:19:44.000But my question is, in Canada, in other countries, all people have the right to get healthcare.
00:19:49.000Do you believe we should move in that direction?
00:19:52.000If you want to talk about other countries' healthcare systems, there are consequences to the decisions that they've made, just as there are consequences to the decisions that we've made.
00:20:00.000I believe, and I look forward to working with you, to make certain that every single American has access to the highest quality care and coverage that is possible.
00:20:08.000As access to does not mean that they are guaranteed health care.
00:20:12.000I have access to buying a ten million dollar home.
00:20:17.000And that's why we believe it's appropriate to put in place a system that gives every person the financial feasibility to be able to purchase the coverage that they want for themselves and for their family.
00:20:27.000The part that's really telling here is where Bernie Sanders just lashes out.
00:20:31.000No, we are not a compassionate society.
00:20:33.000Sure, we're compassionate enough to put me in the Senate for a thousand terms even though I'm 1,000 years old and completely senile and have never done anything useful in my entire life.
00:20:51.000America is by far the most generous society on the face of the earth.
00:20:54.000Americans out-donate Britain and Canada 2 to 1, nations like Italy and Germany 20 to 1, according to the Almanac of American Philanthropy.
00:21:01.000Every single income class, except those earning less than $25,000, more than half of the people in that income class in the United States donate to charity.
00:21:08.000That top 1% that Bernie Sanders loves to hate?
00:21:11.000They give one-third of all charity given in the United States.
00:21:14.000The wealthiest 1.4% of Americans are responsible for 86% of all charitable donations made at death.
00:21:21.000More Americans give charity than vote for presidents of the United States.
00:21:25.000As far as, are we a compassionate society?
00:21:27.000America's growing economy, our blockbuster economy, has made the world rich.
00:21:32.000We have sliced global extreme poverty in half in the last 25 years thanks to the American economy.
00:21:37.000We've freed people all over the world.
00:21:39.000We've sacrificed American lives, hundreds of thousands of American lives, to free Japan, France, Norway, Austria, Greece, Denmark, Korea, Germany, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Kuwait, Iraq, Afghanistan, Germany itself.
00:21:51.000Bernie Sanders, by the way, he spent that time making friends with communists in Nicaragua.
00:21:56.000By the way, as far as poverty in the United States, here's a few research from last year on poverty in the United States.
00:22:19.000Certainly not compared to global standards, but not even according to basic standards of what you would consider super poor.
00:22:25.000Some 96% of poor parents in the United States report their children were never hungry at any time in the prior year.
00:22:31.000A poor child in the United States is more likely to have cable TV, a computer, a widescreen plasma TV, an Xbox, or a TiVo in their home than to be hungry.
00:22:39.000Poor Americans have more living space in their homes than the average non-poor Swede, Frenchman, or German, according to the Heritage Foundation.
00:22:46.000And then you heard Sanders say that our old people, they don't have savings.
00:22:49.000One of the reasons they don't have a lot of savings is because they have Social Security.
00:22:52.000People don't save because they think Social Security is their savings plan.
00:22:56.000The fact is, according to Andrew Biggs and Sylvester Schreiber in the Wall Street Journal, despite a supposedly stingy social security program and ineffective retirement savings vehicles, the average U.S.
00:23:06.000retiree has an income equal to 92% of the average American income, handily outpacing the Scandinavian countries 81%, Germany 85%, Belgium 77%, and many others.
00:23:18.000And by the way, that's more money since our average income is actually higher than the average income in those other countries.
00:23:24.000It's also worth noting again that Social Security eats up a huge chunk of our budget.
00:23:28.000But if this is the play that Democrats are going to make, if this is the way that they're going to campaign from here on in, that Americans are stingy and terrible, it's no wonder that Donald Trump is going to become president tomorrow.
00:23:38.000And Donald Trump should have an easy ride of it if this is the direction in which Democrats and the left are going to move.
00:23:43.000Now we have to break here, but we have much more to discuss.
00:23:45.000I want to talk about what we can expect from the incoming Trump administration.
00:23:48.000You know, how we should treat the incoming Trump administration.
00:23:51.000Plus, we have the mailbag coming as well.