Presidential Mistakes

Last week's post about the article in Rolling Stone reminded me of something that I missed when it was announced for Presidents' Day earlier this year but that I stumbled upon sometime later. The University of Louisville's McConnell Center held a Presidential Moments Conference in which a panel of presidential scholars ranked the ten greatest presidential mistakes. Number 1 is James Buchanan's failure to oppose Southern secession. You've got to admit, that's a big one. Seven states withdrew from the Union after Lincoln was elected but before Buchanan left office, and Buchanan essentially ignored the problem. Number 2 is also Civil War related, as Andrew Johnson's Reconstruction policies are cited for allowing the resistence of Southern confederates to freedom and equality for the freed slaves to become institutionalized throughout the South. Coming in at number 10 was Bill Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. The interesting difference with all the other mistakes (except perhaps for Nixon's Watergate scandal) is that it was a personal problem rather than a policy error. You can argue that it had policy ramifications as it crippled the Clinton presidency from accomplishing more, but I think that's as much a result of the Republican Congress's decisions to punish Clinton for his personal mistakes.

The survey of presidential mistakes also asked the public to rank them, and the public put LBJ's expansion of the Vietnam War and Watergate as numbers 1 and 2. I suspect that's because they're both still in modern memory. But they likewise put Clinton at number 10. One disappointing aspect of this is that the public were given the same ten mistakes and asked to rank them. I'm not sure whether the panel of experts were given the ten in the first place and simply ranked them or if they actually generated the list. Did they come up with Clinton's personal foibles as among the ten worst presidential mistakes of all time, or was it foisted upon them from some source in the McConnell Center? Is it at all significant that the McConnell Center was founded by Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, the current majority whip in the Senate? I hope not.