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President Favorability


vcczar

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29 minutes ago, vcczar said:

Let's see how everyone else does this. Here's a link to make one of these: https://tiermaker.com/create/tier-list-of-us-presidents-with-joe-biden-782793

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Before I do one later today, what exactly are we judging here in terms of favorability? Who's a good President or who do I like? (Noticed that you might have edited the categories from the usual S tier, A tier, etc. thing to grades of favorable.) Just wanting to make sure

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9 minutes ago, Pringles said:

Before I do one later today, what exactly are we judging here in terms of favorability? Who's a good President or who do I like? (Noticed that you might have edited the categories from the usual S tier, A tier, etc. thing to grades of favorable.) Just wanting to make sure

I feel like favorable is sort of a mix of good/like. It's different than approval, I think. For instance, do you approve of Pres. Biden. How favorable are you of Pres. Biden. Might not mean the same thing. For me, I find Carter favorable, but I think he was a bad president, so I might disapprove. 

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7 minutes ago, DakotaHale said:

What’d John Adams do doe

I can not abide a literal founding father, one who believed in the right to legal counsel in the Boston Massacre so much that he represented the British Redcoats, gaining power and immediately setting the First Amendment right to free speech to flames in signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, that were enforced almost entirely against Democratic-Republican journalists. He absolutely knew better and I find it contemptible. 

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9 minutes ago, DakotaHale said:

What’d John Adams do doe

A lot of people consider his Alien & Sedition Acts and Midnight Judges appointments exclusively. He rarely enforced the controversial elements of the Acts. Once all the new courts were created, his job was to fill those offices, which he did. 

What is overlooked is the strong economy and the fact that he might be the only president to have been engaged in an unofficial war and secured peace, rather than upgrading it to an official war. He did this while almost his entire party was fervantly supporting a full-scale war. In this sense, he's the only president that could really take the title "Peacemaker." 

In addition, he pardoned the rebels during the Fries Rebellion, something I don't think Washington would have done, although Jefferson might have. 

I think had he won a 2nd term, he would have repealed the same acts Jefferson repealed as they wouldn't have been necessary. 

I think there's a reason he's typically ranked about 15th to 20th in presidential rankings. 

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6 minutes ago, ShortKing said:

I can not abide a literal founding father, one who believed in the right to legal counsel in the Boston Massacre so much that he represented the British Redcoats, gaining power and immediately setting the First Amendment right to free speech to flames in signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, that were enforced almost entirely against Democratic-Republican journalists. He absolutely knew better and I find it contemptible. 

"All told, between 1798 and 1801, U.S. federal courts prosecuted at least 26 individuals under the Sedition Act; many were editors of Democratic-Republican newspapers, and all opposed the Adams administration." 

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10 minutes ago, vcczar said:

What is overlooked is the strong economy and the fact that he might be the only president to have been engaged in an unofficial war and secured peace, rather than upgrading it to an official war. He did this while almost his entire party was fervantly supporting a full-scale war. In this sense, he's the only president that could really take the title "Peacemaker." 

In addition, he pardoned the rebels during the Fries Rebellion, something I don't think Washington would have done, although Jefferson might have. 

I'm not enamored with his economic platform, but I can't tell you how much of the economic performance during his tenure or shortly after was due to his policies. As for the war, I had always thought it was because the US military at that time was simply not equipped to be embroiled in another war, whatever public sentiment demanded, that war was not an option on the table at all. Adams built up the army and navy but it was my understanding that, even if he had favored war, we were not in a position to pursue it regardless. 

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1 hour ago, vcczar said:

A lot of people consider his Alien & Sedition Acts and Midnight Judges appointments exclusively. He rarely enforced the controversial elements of the Acts. Once all the new courts were created, his job was to fill those offices, which he did. 

What is overlooked is the strong economy and the fact that he might be the only president to have been engaged in an unofficial war and secured peace, rather than upgrading it to an official war. He did this while almost his entire party was fervantly supporting a full-scale war. In this sense, he's the only president that could really take the title "Peacemaker." 

In addition, he pardoned the rebels during the Fries Rebellion, something I don't think Washington would have done, although Jefferson might have. 

I think had he won a 2nd term, he would have repealed the same acts Jefferson repealed as they wouldn't have been necessary. 

I think there's a reason he's typically ranked about 15th to 20th in presidential rankings. 

People are for sure too hard on Adams. The Alien & Sedition Acts were really bad, but not enough to bring him down into the lower tier, at all. A lot of people don't like to admit it, but Adams was basically a third term of Washington, minus one or two things here or there.

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1 hour ago, ShortKing said:

I can not abide a literal founding father, one who believed in the right to legal counsel in the Boston Massacre so much that he represented the British Redcoats, gaining power and immediately setting the First Amendment right to free speech to flames in signing the Alien and Sedition Acts, that were enforced almost entirely against Democratic-Republican journalists. He absolutely knew better and I find it contemptible. 

You have Thomas Jefferson ranked mostly favorable. Enslaving black people is ok, but targeting your political opponents is where you draw the line?

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8 minutes ago, jnewt said:

You have Thomas Jefferson ranked mostly favorable. Enslaving black people is ok, but targeting your political opponents is where you draw the line?

So why do you have Abraham Lincoln so high? He didn’t want to emancipate slaves in the first place you know…

FDR put Japanese people in internment camps. 
 

I wouldn’t dare quote LBJ on what he thought the Civil Rights Act would do, nor the nickname he gave it.

I’m being the devils advocate here but I think these people should be looked at within the context of their time. Some acts like Jackson and the Trail of Tears are heinous and lower my ranking of what is otherwise a good President. But the rest is just “what do you expect?” These people were products of their time. 

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36 minutes ago, Rezi said:

People are for sure too hard on Adams. The Alien & Sedition Acts were really bad, but not enough to bring him down into the lower tier, at all. A lot of people don't like to admit it, but Adams was basically a third term of Washington, minus one or two things here or there.

How do you square then moving Lincoln down a tier?

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26 minutes ago, Pringles said:

I’m being the devils advocate here but I think these people should be looked at within the context of their time. 

I don’t agree with this, but regardless, you could argue the same thing about Adams. Who’s to say his targeting political opponents wasn’t a product of the times?

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2 minutes ago, Hestia said:

So Lincoln does it in war and he gets moved down but Adams does it in peacetime and that's not reasonable to be moved down?

No, it's reasonable to move them down. Adams would be a tier higher if he hadn't done it. I said "not enough to bring him down into the lower tier". "The lower tier" is different from "a lower tier". When I say "the lower tier", I mean below neutral.

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1 hour ago, Rezi said:

Adams would be a tier higher if he hadn't done it. I said "not enough to bring him down into the lower tier". "The lower tier" is different from "a lower tier". When I say "the lower tier", I mean below neutral.

I'm probably being too harsh on Adams in part because to me he's easily the most disappointing of the Founders who became President but I've just never liked him

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