Who Is Your Favorite U.S. President?

[dazzleman]

I guess at the time it was a radical notion that nobody should be allowed to own another human being.  And Lincoln did not even propose the immediate end of slavery, but what amounted to a slow strangulation of it by refusing to allow it to expand.

His main goal was to preserve the union, not end slavery.

The post Civil War period was handled poorly, when the north first took a punitive attitude toward the south, and then abandoned reconstruction.  Blacks in the south lived a terrible life under these conditions, and the treatment of blacks in the south during the period from the 1870s through the 1960s is one of the darkest stains on our history.

That is why the term "state's rights" has such a sinister meaning for blacks.  It was used to defend treatment of blacks that was unquestionably prohibited by the constitution.  I believe in principal in state's rights, but WITHIN the confines of the constitution.

Although I am a northerner, I have found northern hypocrisy on the race issue to be breathtaking.  Northerners like to condemn southerns for their treatment of blacks, but it is really only marginally different in the north.

The north is structured differently than the south, with greater economic segregation and smaller political units.  Therefore, it is much more common in the north for blacks to live in completely different political jurisdictions, and school districts, than in the south.  Segregationist laws that were enacted in the south to keep the races apart were never really needed in the north to get the same effect.  So while southerners have had to acclimate themselves to a black presence in their towns and schools on an integrated basis, white northerners, for all their protestations of liberalism, have for the most part never had to acclimate to much of a black presence in their own towns and schools.  And when they have been asked to, the reaction has sometimes been violent.  So I don't think northerners are in much of a position to lecture southerners on race issues.

My favorite presidents are Lincoln, TR Roosevelt, FD Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower and Reagan.

[dazzleman]

States-Rights - I agree with state's rights within the constitution.  But I don't think state's rights should consist of a state choosing to deny some of its citizens the right to vote, as was the case in the south for decades.

I don't trust the federal government on most things, and generally prefer to have things other than national defense run at the state or local level.