Will Obama be remembered in the top 10 of Presidents?

[Leinad]

Top 15, I think. He's done a lot of things that he wanted to accomplish. Some of them I agree with, others I do not. Good for getting us out of Iraq, but then he took us to Libya, which is now even worse than it was before. I like how same-sex marriage is legal now, and we've normalized relations with Cuba, but I see Obama as much too statist and interventionist in general. Probably the best president since I started caring about politics (the competition is Dubya, so it's not saying that much).

I think he'll be like the Democratic version of Reagan. Loved by liberals and independents, reviled by conservatives.

I like that: liberals love Obama, hate Reagan; conservatives love Reagan, hate Obama; moderates love both, and libertarians hate both?

I'll take either over Wilson.

he is not speaking to Christians like myself what about Christians rights who get bullied and pushed around and harassed. etc. etc. i do not recognize this america anymore this america is a stranger to me.

Yes, Christians should be allowed freedom of conscience without government censorship, but gays should also be allowed freedom to marry. It's not a Christian nation, nor was it ever, it's a nation with freedom of religion, which means that people should have the freedom to ignore religion and, if it doesn't objectively harm anyone, live however they want.

See, freedom goes both ways. This was true in the days of Washington, the days of Obama, and the days of Wilson (who was crap).

tl;dr

Blue avatars post garbage equating their current unthinking and illogical hatred of uppity negro Barrack Obama to him not being a top 10 president, which he clearly is. Of course, they think Reagan is a top 10 president, so...

I think it's off-topic to bring racism into it. I'm sure most Republicans on this site hate him for reason more to do with his politics than he himself.

But yeah, you might be right with the rest of your post. Then again, it's hard to say that the red avatars praising him as the greatest ever aren't doing the reverse thing.

The only thing we should measure presidents on is objective success; anything else and we're basically ranking how they match our views. Getting us past crises, getting through major policy wins (whether we agree with them or not), and indicators such as re-election and approval ratings. Reagan, for example, had high approval ratings, won two landslides, and his vice-president got elected himself on Reagan's popularity, giving their party the White House for 3 straight terms for the first time since the Democrats did it with FDR and Truman. I can go for a while about why I personally have issues with both of them, but the facts don't lie: they're each clearly better than average, and certainly better than Wilson.

[Leinad]

Can I just say, I really appreciate your posts Leinad. It's nice to have a right-libertarian that is neither insane nor inane.

Thanks! I think that most people are probably more insane/inane on the internet, but I'm actually the other way around.

Criminal justice: probably the best bipartisan thing Obama could do. An alliance between fiscal conservatives, libertarians and progressives could unwreack some of the damage forced on the justice system by 90's tinpot populism. Elimination of old mandatory laws and three strikes, release of non-violent prisoners, genuinely look at the Drug War.

If Obama does this, he's easily top 10 in my book. Especially if you add abolition of the death penalty.

In my opinion he's in the George HW bush category of successful but not great. His legacy will probably be more of a "he opined doors" president then as a great president.

Bushie?    "opined"?

Open, sorry bad grammar. I meant he would be remembered as good but not in the top 2 tiers. When they rank them 1-43 he will be in the teens.

You're grammar was pretty good, but your spelling was shaky. "Opined" is a different word, "opened" is what you're looking for. No worries, spelling mistakes happen to everyone, especially when you accidently spelled a different word, so spell-check doesn't catch it.

I put Obama decisively ahead of GHWB, but that might just be because I loathe the Bush Dynasty.

In my opinion he's in the George HW bush category of successful but not great. His legacy will probably be more of a "he (opened) doors" president then as a great president.

Sure, he opened doors -- doors to the assets of America to the worst speculators of the time. He let America dedicates its energies of economic activity to a speculative boom based upon predatory lending. The Bush economic model depended upon hucksters getting rich by hurting their customers.

That is horrible business; such invariably implodes when people lose faith in it.

Dubya will undoubtedly be seen as one of the ten worst Presidents for a very long time. 

He wasn't talking about Dubya (who I agree is pretty clearly among the 10 worst), he was talking about George Herbert Walker Bush, former CIA director, Reagan's veep, and President from 1989-1993, after upsetting Ron Paul's Libertarian ticket in the 1988 election.

WAY too soon to tell, anybody that tells you otherwise is just showing their bias.

I agree, although we can look at objective standards to guess his ranking. It's hard to separate opinions on politicians from opinions on political issues, but even if you do that it's still a subjective list.

Harry Truman had terrible approval rankings when he left office, but now he's considered top 20 if not top 10. And John Tyler was widely considered top 10 when he left office, but now he's not even top 20.

[Leinad]

John Tyler was widely considered top 10 when he left office

Well, when he left office he was by definition in the top 10, so that doesn't tell us much.

And that's the intentional joke.

Maybe it did undercut the point a bit. To reiterate that point: it's hard to say without doubt if a president is good or not (even if you look past ideology--which is near impossible in itself), but it's even harder without the full context of history.

[Leinad]

I was going to seriously argue why I dislike enough of your "candidates"  (like the medicore tool Wilson, the inept disaster of LBJ and the guy who got the country in the unwinnable War of 2012) to rate them higher than Barry. But then I realised you had Nixon (!!!!!) on your list and realised you are insane.

I like to call Nixon both a top-5 and bottom-5 president. His list of positive accomplishments, ignoring the major negatives, puts him very high on the list.

Of course, we actually look at the negatives, so Nixon is crap. But calling him a good president, while crazy, isn't that crazy.

I love Christian persecution complex. Their right to discriminate (or using their code words "conscience") is liberty, but those views being pilloried in a liberal secular democracy is intolerable discrimination...

I dislike discrimination, I really do. And I'm in favor of gay marriage. But I oppose letting the government (or anyone else, for that matter) force people to do things against their will. The government should only punish people for crimes that objectively hurt others. I don't think this qualifies. And this isn't conservatism: I'd legalize drugs, gambling, prostitution, polygamy, and whatever else makes me have a yellow avatar instead of a blue one, in addition to my mostly non-interventionist foreign policy.

I think that a society where people are free to do whatever they want, including oppose things they personally don't like, and marry people they do (with consent, of course), is best. This is unfortunate because everyone links the two issues as the same, and is either pro-freedom-of-marriage and anti-freedom-of-conscience or vice-versa.

Really, the thing I'm getting the most annoyed by is conservatives who think America's gone down the tubes due to gay marriage because of "liberty." No, gay marriage restricts religious liberty as much as what I eat for lunch does. What restricts religious liberty is statist anti-discrimination policies (again, not saying that the discrimination is right, just saying that the government shouldn't have a role in it).

Also, this isn't about my right to do something, this is about people's rights in general. I think people have the right to express any opinion and make decisions as a result of that, as long as they don't objectively harm others. And I'm not against people criticizing Christians who believe this, I'm just against the government fining people unless they comply. That's really all it comes down to.

They're two different issues, both rooted in whether we think the individual should be free to live how they want or the government should correct societal wrongs such as discrimination or "immorality." If you disagree with me on one or both of these issues, that's fine! It's your right to do so. But to link it to anything else isn't accurate.

Not saying that you addressed me specifically (you didn't) or presuming that I was the intended target, just clearing that up.