WFB:
Martin Van Buren should never have been president. That’s not an insult.
America’s eighth chief executive belongs to a distinct phylum of presidents: those who possessed skills both extraordinary enough to elevate them to the White House and yet not quite aligned with what the nation actually needs from a commander in chief.
James Madison, for instance, may have been the greatest political theorist in the nation’s history, but that was not necessarily the right skill set for the man presiding over the War of 1812. William Howard Taft’s talents were better suited for the Supreme Court (where he ended up post-presidency) than the Oval Office. Herbert Hoover had a technocratic genius for tasks like leading the humanitarian effort that kept Europe from starvation during World War I, but that also led him to overestimate his power to steer the country out of the Great Depression.
Van Buren’s case is perhaps more remarkable than any of these, however, because the job for which he was best suited didn’t exist until he created it: political strategist. more here
A perfectly modern politician!
Ran for office just to be in office – the public – and the country – be damned.
mortem tyrannis
izlamo delenda est …
Were The Van Buren Boys available for comment?
You can criticize any president for missteps along the way, the job lends itself to “learning on the fly”.
Lincoln, most tout as our greatest president, suspended habeous corpus and jailed citizens without trial. Probably his biggest blunder was his ill-fated attempt at bi-partisanship, allowing a Democrat as his running mate and several others to infect his cabinet, undermining him at every turn. And yet, he saved the union.
The best presidents present a coherent list of prescriptions that he believes in and articulates these principles to the people in terms so concise and clear that they command assent. And then when he gets elected he does everything he said he would do.
The democrats haven’t changed much since Van Buren taught them to politic or is it addicted them to office holding.
He sucked. He blocked Texas from becoming a state because he considered them a slave state. He caused a 4 year long depression. Started an Indian war. And changed politics to the ugly mess it is today. He’s was the catalyst for why a good businessman would not survive in the political jungle.
It can be argued that Hoover’s Depression policies met the same fate as Trump 45’s border wall: they weren’t allowed to be effective.
On the other hand, FDR was pretty much allowed to do whatever he wanted and the Depression really was not laid to rest until World War II. The only things that were blocked were stopped by the Supreme Court — which is why he wanted to pack it.
Fun fact: Martin Van Buren was the first president whose first language was not English (his family was Dutch).