back to the South Pole

 
Mock him if you will, but Bill Clinton just isn’t a bad president. Well, bad in the sense of "damn, that president is ineffective and outright stupid," not bad in the sense of "damn, that president is bad like Michael Jackson" or "damn, that president is bad like Marv Albert." Yessssss.
Seriously, though, we could have done much worse than ol’ Bill. In our nation’s over-200 year history we’ve elected ourselves some real political morons.
We started out pretty strong, with the Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison starting lineup. The next batch wasn’t too shabby, either. Monroe, Quincy Adams and Jackson are nothing to sneeze at.
Jackson, while by no means a bad president, did have a little problem. You see, our friend Andrew had a personal dislike of Biddle, the aristocratic president of the National Bank. This dislike turned into a touch of paranoia as Jackson feared the bank was being overrun by foreign investors, and that it just had too much power in political manners. So in 1932 Biddle applied for a new charter, Jackson vetoed the bank, called it unconstitutional, and once reelected, he was so damn popular he just destroyed the bank. To do this, Jackson and his buddy Taney (Secretary of the Treasury) removed federal funds from the banks and put them into pet banks, forcing Biddle to recall loans and eventually close down. The only problem with this was that the bank failure spurred a small...panic...which resulted in a depression. So when Van Buren was elected in 1936, he spent most of his term trying to fix the financial mishap that Jackson left with his little bank issue.
William Henry Harrison was elected in 1840 only to die one month after taking office (pu-lease), and was replaced by John Tyler.
Things were pretty running pretty smoothly until Andrew Johnson’s impeachment. Ouch. He wasn’t even a really bad president, but he violated the Tenure of Office Act (which held that office-holders may serve until Senate approved a successor). He was impeached (but not convicted — wahoo!) in 1868.
Johnson was succeeded by Grant, an even more scandalous fellow than our famed Clinton. This hard-drinking war hero appointed a bunch of idiots, including his Secretary of War, his private secretary, and officials in the Treasury and Navy departments. These folks were all corrupt, and Grant tried to defend some of them.  Bad idea. Future politicians take note:  run from corruption and scandal. Run far, run fast, run like the wind.
Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland, Harrison, and McKinley were simply uninspiring. And Garfield didn’t last all that long, dying after infections from a gunshot he took in 1881. But Cleveland was kind of cool since he served as our 22nd and 24th presidents. He was also cool because this wild bachelor fathered an illegitimate son, leading to some Clinton-worthy taunts during his campaign (wacky Republicans would chant "Ma! Ma! Where’s Pa?" but those Democrats wouldn’t be beat and responded "Gone to the White House, Ha! Ha! Ha!"). Crazy politicians.
After McKinley was assassinated and Theodore Roosevelt took over we entered another period of pretty good presidents. Taft (while fat, was effective), Wilson...okay, it didn’t last all that long.
Harding suffered from a bit of Grant-syndrome: appointing friends with some corrupt leanings. He had some convicted for fraud, bribery, you name it. Even his Attorney General was implicated in some of this. Tsk, tsk. The most famous of Harding’s debacles was the Teapot Dome scandal, a little transaction which involved government folks leasing  federal property to private oil companies. Harding was only able to escape all this crap through death, which he did, in 1923.
After that, Coolidge was uneventful, Hoover screwed up big time with economic issues, and FDR was in office way too long. He also tried to mess with the Supreme Court. Not a wise plan. Kennedy could have done it, though. He could have gotten away with anything with those boy-ish good looks. His roving eye was apparently a distinguishing Kennedy trait.
Speaking of boy-ish good looks (ahem), I give you Richard Nixon. What can I say about our friend Richie, Dick, Dicky, Mr. Watergate himself. He, too, taught our future politicians a good lesson: don’t audiotape yourself saying stupid things. Rather than face impeachment, he resigned in 1974 amidst a scandal that would make Grant and Harding proud.
And last, but certainly not least, Ronald Reagan. I still marvel at the fact that our country willingly elected a former actor (and a poor former actor, at that) to run the United States for eight years. We got what we deserved, though: Reaganomics, an accelerated arms race, the Iran Contra Affair (which Bush really knew nothing of...that’s cute), and a really bad anti-drug campaign courtesy of Nancy.
Oh yes, 200 plus years of history, political mistakes, whoopsies, uh-ohs, and please don’t mention this to my wife-s. It’s stories like these that make me proud to be an American.