So, anyway, I get this email from friends who are high on Obama and his convention speech, and in it they tell me that right wing Republican Pat Buchanan - yes, even he - has to admit that Obama’s speech was one of the greatest in convention history. I write back, smugly, that I am pleased not to agree with Buchanan.

Then came today’s New York Times. In a piece titled, “The Audacity of Hype” William Safire lays out his complaints against Obama.

– Maui Curmudgeon

By the Maui Curmudgeon (32nd in a 43-part series)

How do the U.S. Presidents stack up? I thought I’d find out by reading biographies of all 43 presidents, in the order of their administrations. Here are briefly the pros and cons of my discoveries, the interesting bits, and how I’d rank him. For comparison, I give you the 1982 Murrary-Blessing ranking, a survey of hundreds of leading historians who ranked each president by number. This survey is the gold standard of presidential rankings and is most cited when this kind of thing needs bringing up in media.

FRANKLIN DELANO ROOSEVELT: 1933-1944 ~ 32nd U.S. President

The offspring of the fabulously wealthy patrician families Delano and Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt seems to have been molded for his time and the position of presidency from the very start. A graduate of Groton, FDR was strongly influenced by its president, Reverend Endicott Peabody, who called FDR to a life of social responsibility through public service.

He graduated from Columbia Law School, but law bored him, and in 1910 FDR gained a state senate seat in New York in the party of his father (not his great cousin Teddy), the Democratic Party, which, beginning with Grover Cleveland, had made its way through education and hard work to realize the values embodied in the likes of Abraham Lincoln were the ones who had to guide the country for it to thrive, values which the Republican party, beginning with Warren G. Harding, rebuked.

Read the rest…

By the Maui Curmudgeon (31st in a 43-part series)

How do the U.S. Presidents stack up? I thought I’d find out by reading biographies of all 43 presidents, in the order of their administrations. Here are briefly the pros and cons of my discoveries, the interesting bits, and how I’d rank him. For comparison, I give you the 1982 Murrary-Blessing ranking, a survey of hundreds of leading historians who ranked each president by number. This survey is the gold standard of presidential rankings and is most cited when this kind of thing needs bringing up in media.

HERBERT HOOVER: 1929-1933 ~ 31st U.S. President

Herbert Hoover is the very embodiment of an important lesson in American public life: intelligence and experience does not necessarily make a leader. How smart was he? Well, at the end of World War I, he accompanied President Woodrow Wilson to the Paris Peace Conference.

Attending was John Maynard Keynes, the brilliant British economist. When the conference was over, Keynes said, “Hoover was the only man who emerged from the ordeal of Paris with an enhanced reputation.”

Hoover came into the presidency as the heir apparent. Though President Calvin Coolidge despised Hoover (he called him “wonder boy” out of jealousy), Hoover, who had been Secretary of Commerce under the false “boom years” of the early 1920’s, took the reins supremely confident in American business and conservative rights. Was anyone more wrong? In less than seven months, people really were jumping out of windows to their deaths.

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There are monsters among men. And everyone knows what this means, because we each have had monster moments in otherwise normal lives.

What makes a man a monster? Self-deceit? Hypocrisy? Malice? Lack of fellow feeling? Heartlessness? Soullessness? Possession by a “Dark Whisperer”?

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