Worst. President. Ever.

by Robert Strauss

As my 25th wedding anniversary approached, I tried to be creative in buying gifts for my wife. I had the idea of a silver coin that marked 25 years of something or other. I went to a local coin shop, and as I idled over some of the display cases, I noticed a set of coins from the mid-19th century. Oddly, the coins from the 1840s and 1850s were large—up until 1857, when the coins started becoming, at best, half the size of the others.

“Oh, the Panic of 1857,” the owner said when I asked him about the change of size. “It was really bad. The president didn’t seem to have any solution except to use less gold or silver in the coins.”

Now that is inept presidential decision-making. During the current election campaign, there has been a lot of gnashing of teeth over the possibility that—whoever the winner is—he or she will be so terrible as a leader they will bring down the republic as the worst president since independence. And before the current candidates were known, the two most recent White House occupants, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, have been consistently reviled by their detractors as the worst men to lead the country.

But Obama and Bush can both take heart. And Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton can gain solace, perhaps, from knowing that no matter how badly they do, they almost certainly won’t rank last. By my reckoning, that place belongs to James Buchanan, genial a man though he was. I’ve made quite a study of him. My innocent encounter at the coin shop only reinforced my lifelong determination to take an offbeat look at, let’s say, the lesser presidents. My father was definitely the only one in our suburban neighborhood with a biography of Franklin Pierce. Everywhere we went, he forced me to read historical plaques—stopping the car in a shrieking halt at times to view them. If I were to write a book about a president, it surely wouldn’t be about Washington or Lincoln, or even Silent Cal Coolidge. It would have to be about someone as ineffectual as possible.

Buchanan, the only president from my native state, Pennsylvania, turned out to be my man.

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Worst. President. Ever. - POLITICO Magazine