February 9, 2025
Two Decades of Presidential Mediocrity
Chief executives since Reagan have uniformly lacked leadership.
Chief executives since Reagan have uniformly lacked leadership.

As the unprecedented effort of the elders of the Democratic Party to use the Justice Department and intelligence services to manipulate and then undo a presidential election collapses, their response is a study in the corruption of unchallenged incumbency. The reason the country is in its present impasse is inadequate post-Reagan presidential leadership. Franklin D. Roosevelt and his chosen successor, Harry Truman, got the country out of the Great Depression and salvaged 95 percent of the economic system that had collapsed, did the necessary to assist the democracies to stay in the war against Hitler, and then conducted the American war effort with great skill and put in place the structure of future peace and the institutions that won the Cold War, relatively bloodlessly. When the time came for change, after five Democratic terms, it was gentle change, to Dwight Eisenhower, and almost no discernible policy change. There followed almost a decade of peace and prosperity, as Ike extracted the country successfully from the Korean War and kept it out of Vietnam.

The country reached for bold and vigorous change in moving a whole generation to John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson’s New Frontier and Great Society. Civil rights was a triumph for LBJ, but he left Nixon a terrible crisis in Vietnam. Nixon successfully triangulated Great Power relations and withdrew from Vietnam while retaining a non-Communist government in Saigon, but the Democrats, exploiting Nixon’s mismanagement of the trivial Watergate affair, brought his administration down and abandoned Indochina. The country was not ready for Jimmy Carter’s forlorn lamentations of a national malady as he urged Americans to wear cardigans and turn down their thermostats during an oil crisis. Ronald Reagan was a more activist and charismatic Eisenhower, though a film star did not have the prestige of a successful World War theater commander. Reagan restored confidence and prosperity and won the Cold War, bloodlessly, by escalating the arms race into defensive anti-missile weapons. He left America content and alone at the summit of the world.

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See Also:

(1) Get ready for ‘Obamagate’ to become ‘ObamaBidengate’

(2) Joe Biden and America’s First Basement Campaign

(3) Michael Flynn for Vice President

(4) McConnell: Obama “should have kept his mouth shut”

(5) “President Obama’s Hands are Dirty. They Are Beyond Dirty. He Has Judicial Blood On His Hands.” – Former US Attorney Joe diGenova