Who is the worst president in history? No, it’s not Barack Obama: This year, for some reason, there has been a great deal of reappraisal of Barack Obama’s presidency and legacy.
But there’s no reason to consider him one of the worst presidents in history.
Barack Obama: How To Judge Him
Where does Barack Obama rank among U.S. presidents?
All such rankings are subjective, of course, but when historians have been surveyed about how the presidents rank, the 44th president is usually far from the bottom.
The Siena poll in 2022 sought to rank the presidents, and it placed Obama 11th. President Biden in that survey is 19th, Donald Trump is 43rd, and George W. Bush 35th. That survey named Franklin D. Roosevelt the best president ever, followed by Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, and picked Andrew Johnson as the worst.
“Obama’s signature domestic policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was unpopular with Republicans but extended health insurance coverage to 20 million Americans. His administration helped guide the country through the Great Recession and rescued the U.S. auto industry,” CBS News said of the 44th president. “A wildly popular president, he moved out of the top 10 for 2022, partly due to his dealings with Congress and international relations.”
On Quinnipiac poll, in 2014, named Obama the worst postwar president, although only 33 percent of those asked picked the then-president. And a book was published in 2018 called “The Worst President in History: The Legacy of Barack Obama.” However, it doesn’t appear that any major historian has expressed the belief that Obama is the worst president in history.
Of late, there has been much reconsideration of Obama’s legacy. Most of the major conservative critiques of Obama during his presidency – that he was a socialist or communist, or a secret Muslim, or not really born in the United States — were blatantly false, while Obama managed to avoid major scandals that dinged his administration in any way. Obama remains the only president since Watergate to never be investigated by a special counsel or independent counsel.
But at the same time, there has been much recrimination on the left about Obama in the years since he left office. The criticisms cover everything from Obama not pushing for a larger stimulus package in 2009, to his having lost Congress and numerous state legislatures by not paying much attention to the institutional health of the Democratic Party, and for not pushing harder for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to retire at a time when Obama could have replaced her.
The administration of Obama’s vice president, Joe Biden, appears to have learned a lot of lessons from Obama’s failures, from the size of the American Rescue Plan Act to the successful push for Justice Stephen Breyer to retire, to a better-than-expected showing in the 2022 midterm elections.
Then, there’s whatever this is.
Tablet Magazine published a truly bizarre interview last week in which writer David Samuels interviewed historian David Garrow, who had published a biography of Obama five years earlier.
The interview was full of howlers, beginning with treating it as a major gotcha that Obama and a woman he dated in the early 1980s have differing accounts of the circumstances of their breakup, which is far from a rare occurrence with couples who broke up four decades ago.
Further, the piece treats it as a major breach of norms that Obama continued to live in Washington after leaving office — actually using the phrase “violating a norm governing the transfer of presidential power,” as though Obama had fomented an insurrection or something — while also implying, seemingly out of thin air, that Obama is currently in control of large swaths of government policy, including the Iran portfolio.
It calls the birtherism episode a mistake by… Obama, and both the interviewer and interviewee treat it as a self-evident that the biggest mistake of Obama’s presidency was that he did not start a war with Syria.
Expertise and Experience
Stephen Silver is a Senior Editor for 19FortyFive. He is an award-winning journalist, essayist and film critic, who is also a contributor to the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Broad Street Review and Splice Today. The co-founder of the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, Stephen lives in suburban Philadelphia with his wife and two sons. Follow him on Twitter at @StephenSilver.
