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Not everyone is happy with President Barack Obama. Reactionaries are unhappy with him because he’s a Democrat. “The business sector” is unhappy with him because they feel he doesn’t sufficiently appreciate them. Many “average” schmoes are unhappy with him because unemployment is around 10%. And even many liberals/Democrats are unhappy with him because it seems, sometimes, like he isn’t actually all that concerned with what we thought were our (i.e., that of him and ourselves alike) priorities.

And certainly, at least in this last item, I share some of the disappointment. Some things just don’t seem to make sense at all, no matter how you look at them, such as volunteering expanded oil and gas drilling out of the blue one day.*

At the same time, though, and without actually denying that dumb acts or statements are anything other than just plain dumb, lately I’ve found myself wondering: if Obama does screw up a lot, how are we arriving at our standard for “a lot?” Honestly, when was the last time America had a really good President?

If you ask a reactionary, I imagine (epistemic closure warning: I don’t talk to a lot of reactionaries, least of all about party politics) you’ll get a pretty fast and typically-certain response: “Ronald Reagan!” Yet even without agreeing with that suggestion, I think it would have to be rather telling, since the Gipper left office nearly 22 years ago. I was ten.

In the intervening two decades and change, we’ve had two Republican presidents; what about them? These days, Bush II and perhaps Bush I as well would elicit some frowning and muttering about “betrayal of conservative principles,” or maybe at best an awkward “oh yes, well, them too.” So in general, even Republicans probably have to reach some ways back (indeed, far enough back that memories can grow hazy and rose-tinted) to find a President they’d heartily endorse as having done a truly good job.

Whereas me, a liberal and (small “c”) constitutional malcontent? Yeah, I dunno… FDR?

I mean seriously, lets look at Presidents in recent decades. I think we can pretty much dismiss Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush I and Bush II right away; Bush I is probably the best of that lot and mainly for having done relatively limited damage. If we’re judging on the basis of political effectiveness, as seems to be the case with at least a portion of the criticism of Obama, then we have to knock off a lot of points for old H.W.

Jimmy Carter, a nice guy with some good intentions, also crashes and burns in the “political effectiveness” category.

Bill Clinton? A vexing question, evaluating Bill Clinton as president. I would probably say he did the best job of anyone in my lifetime, and probably in the past forty years at least. But did he do an actual “very good” job, or more a “least bad” job?

I look back on the 1990s as halcyon days in many ways, the like of which I may not live to see again. (Pause for a dismal sigh, and a swallow of bourbon.) We should credit Bill with some of that, I think, but not go overboard. Bill’s presidency was a time of economic expansion and prosperity, for the most part… but what great challenges were overcome to achieve this? There was no global economic meltdown, no oil shock.

And in this time of prosperity, what did Clinton’s America actually accomplish? A balanced budget and even a small surplus, which is no mean accomplishment compared with most modern administrations, but 1) a booming economy helped a lot with that and 2) again, I’m trying to evaluate presidencies objectively rather than relatively, just now. Otherwise, no health care reform, no transition to a clean and sustainable economy. No Apollo-style great project. No big advances in civil liberties.

Mind you I’m not trying to run the guy down. I recall rather well how he faced a rabid wingnut legislature for most of his time in office, one which was far more interested in personally destroying him than in accomplishing anything useful. But that, too, would seem to indicate a shortcoming in terms of being a “very good” president; we tend to think of “Slick Willy” as a master politician, and in some ways he is, but was he really so politically effective as president as to make us think “yes, this kind of fumbling is clearly avoidable; it can be done better!”

I mean, we mostly remember Bill as politically effective for winning a second term and leaving office relatively popular, I think. But this was also the man who saw decades-old Democratic majorities in Washington obliterated; if he survived the resulting firestorm he also failed to prevent it. He was also raked over the coals for getting a blowjob from an intern**: certainly not reasonable or fair, but at the same time probably not an example of political mastery of affairs (in any sense of the word). So I’m not sure how much even Bill demonstrates that our apparent expectations of what a president should be able to do are realistic.

If you want to go back as far as LBJ, well, for what that’s worth I don’t think we have a clear-cut winner either: Johnson accomplished a lot of very admirable work, and was certainly politically effective, but also dragged out the senseless carnage in southeast Asia for years and was quite possibly mad. Also, we may have to assign him an asterisk because like Teddy Roosevelt, another combination busy reformer and aggressor, LBJ never passed the full set of tests/tortures we require of someone who is elected president on his own, without being an incumbent.

Among those who do, it would seem to remain a very open question as to how well it’s possible to do the job of president in modern America.

Hell, I’m starting to think that maybe I’ve been wrong, and that even Governor of California isn’t quite so hopeless a job as President of the United States. Especially considering what we pay. Granted, $400,000/year is an awful lot of money to me, and frankly I doubt that adding a zero to that figure would actually draw in amazing talents we’ve been missing out on. But even NFL coaches may have a better prospect of success than a U.S. President, and most of them seem perpetually in danger of firing. Yet they’re paid amounts so obscene as to basically place them beyond concepts of sympathy or fairness; i.e., for that much money I think one can demand that someone walk on water and still not seem unreasonable for firing them if they fall short.

I dunno. This kind of fits in with my “too big to succeed” thesis regarding America itself. The job just may not be one that it’s possible for mortal man (or woman, presumably) to do really well. I certainly reserve the right to criticize Obama and any future presidents as and when I see fit, of course… but in the big picture I’m really not sure that we’re being realistic when we act flabbergasted that the president seems to be fucking up really often.

* The issue of this federal salaries freeze is perhaps another matter. Yeah, it’s  economically contractionary, so I guess it’s bad in that sense, because Uncle Paul said so. But is it really senseless, politically? I don’t know. I really don’t know that I see how this “reactive devaluation” concept works, here, where “If I give you something that you haven’t asked for or worked for, you tend to underappreciate it. It’s quite different if you’ve got to pull it out of me.” I mean, if the GOP were to have pried this concession out of Obama, what message would that send? If the particular concession is a bad thing, then why is he doing it; if it’s a good thing, then why did it have to be pried out of him? Yes, I understand various complexities which undermine those questions, but I don’t entirely understand how they are to be appreciated by our nuance-blind national dialogue.

** Y’know, where is Monica Lewinsky? I don’t mean literally; I really don’t need to know. I mean more like, “why hasn’t someone given her a TV show yet?” She seems like she’d fit right in with today’s media culture. Was she just born a dozen years too early? Or does even the woman who blew the president have more standards than 21st century America’s celebutard society?