Most qualified president taking office

[President Johnson]

Who would you label as the most qualified and prepared president once he took office? Regardless of policies. I'd say Joe Biden is actually a top contender, especially in modern times. 36 years of experience in the senate, including chair of the Judiciary & Foreign Affairs Committees, as well as two terms as active vice president. Joe Biden is actually one of the few presidents to come in with foreign policy experience. Few presidents in recent decades actually had, such as Bush the elder.

Donald Trump was easily the least qualified president, even if you forget about his policies.

Thoughts?

[🦀🎂🦀🎂]

A good case can be made for James Buchanan, amusingly.

[brucejoel99]

A good case can be made for James Buchanan, amusingly.

The hilarious thing about Buchanan's qualifications was that he only got his 1st ambassadorship - to Russia - because Jackson hated him, thought (evidently, correctly) that he was incompetent, & wanted to send him to the furthest place he thought possible, which was Russia. Unfortunately, this made him look experienced to people who only went by titles, & he kept on getting better & better jobs (e.g., Senator, Secretary of State, Ambassador to the U.K.) until he ended up in the White House.

[H. Ross Peron]

Thomas Jefferson
James Madison
John Quincy Adams
James Buchanan
Richard Nixon

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Biden is far and away the most experienced President in history in all the ways we normally measure and think about experience. Either Buchanan or Bush 41 is a surprisingly distant second.

[brucejoel99]

In any event, the answer to this question really depends on what exactly one considers to be their ideal definition of "qualified," & that's inherently subjective. There's not exactly an objectivity to presidential qualifications, especially when some Presidents have proven that they can come into office with very little experience & nevertheless excel, while others came in with what would amount to a wealth of experience, only to turn out awful.

On paper, one could argue that Buchanan (lol in hindsight, as alluded to earlier) & Poppy Bush were probably the 2 best qualified given the titles which they'd previously held (Bush having been a solider, a successful businessman, a Congressman, U.N. Ambassador, RNC Chair, Ambassador to China, CIA Director, & then Vice President), but one could just as easily argue that serving in less roles wouldn't necessarily serve to make somebody less qualified, especially if they did so for a longer period of time. The (obvious) case-in-point here would be the incumbent: even though he was only a Senator for a majority of his life prior to becoming VP, he did a lot in the Senate, chairing both the Judiciary & Foreign Relations committees for many years, & serving as the primary voice behind the passage of some of the most significant pieces of legislation of his tenure, including the Violence Against Women Act & the Assault Weapons Ban. Seriously, you'd be hard-pressed to find people aside from Majority Leaders & Speakers who did more in Congress than he did in his 36 years as a Senator. And that was all before he basically served as a co-Secretary of State while he was VP.

So, if you're just looking at the number of on-paper roles which an incoming President had previously served in, then yeah, the answer's probably Buchanan or Poppy Bush, but James Monroe (a member of the Confederation Congress, a Senator, Ambassador to France, Governor of Virginia, Ambassador to the U.K., Governor of Virginia again, Secretary of War, & then Secretary of State), John Quincy Adams (Ambassador to the Netherlands & Prussia, a state legislator, a Senator, Ambassador to Russia & the U.K., & Secretary of State), & LBJ (a Congressman, a Senator then Majority Whip & Leader who basically made the Senate majority leadership as powerful as it is today, & VP) are certainly in contention up there as well. However, if you're taking both the significance - rather than necessarily just the amount - of their previous qualifications into account as well as general competency, then I'm not really sure you could beat the breadth of experience in positions directly relevant to the job that Biden & Poppy Bush came into office with, given their mix of significant legislative & executive experience that also included backgrounds heavy in foreign policy.

Oh, & I guess former President Dick Cheney was also exceptionally qualified too, given his having been the White House Chief of Staff, a Congressman & member of congressional leadership, Secretary of Defense, & then VP.

[Statilius the Epicurean]

Biden is far and away the most experienced President in history in all the ways we normally measure and think about experience. Either Buchanan or Bush 41 is a surprisingly distant second.

Several terms as chair of both the Senate Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committee, arguably the two most important policy areas of the Presidency, is difficult to top in terms of Congressional experience alone.  

[Orser67]

I'm partial to Monroe. He negotiated one of the most important treaties in American history (Louisiana Purchase), served as ambassador to two of the three most important countries for U.S. foreign policy at the time (Britain and France), served as Secretary of War during the War of 1812, twice served as the governor of one of the largest and most important states, served in the Senate, served in the Congress of the Confederation, fought in the American Revolution, and served as Secretary of State (and a key presidential adviser) for the six years immediately prior to taking office.

[Senator-elect Spark]

Biden is far and away the most experienced President in history in all the ways we normally measure and think about experience. Either Buchanan or Bush 41 is a surprisingly distant second.

[Lincoln Republican]

Nixon certainly has to be among that group of the most qualified when coming to the Presidency, but then he let down the nation.

[TDAS04]

Martin Van Buren is somewhat up there.

[StateBoiler]

I've recently taken in some historical information to where I think a lot more of Van Buren than I did previously. I have enough books I need to read before I can buy more, but I might try and find a Van Buren biography.

"Most qualified" does not necessarily mean "will end up being good". Buchanan is often cited, but John Quincy Adams greatly struggled as president. It's easy to imagine an alternate universe where Jackson is elected President by the House in 1824, and historians for the next 200 years wonder "what could've been if they had only selected Adams who was significantly more qualified". To go with a more modern example, Lyndon Johnson was very qualified but is considered a failure by the anti-war crowd in spite of his domestic policy achievements.

[Del Tachi]

Slightly OT, but the trivia piece that Trump is the first president "elected without military or political experience" has always seemed a bit weird to me.

Like, are there actually any meaningful similarities in the experiences of Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower or Herbert Hoover, for example?  Lumping them all in as having "military of political experience" seems very reductionist

Understood this way, Biden's election as president is just as much a departure from the historical norm as Trump was.  There has never been such an exceptionally long-tenured politician who achieved the presidency

 

[Kingpoleon]

Slightly OT, but the trivia piece that Trump is the first president "elected without military or political experience" has always seemed a bit weird to me.

Like, are there actually any meaningful similarities in the experiences of Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower or Herbert Hoover, for example?  Lumping them all in as having "military of political experience" seems very reductionist

Understood this way, Biden's election as president is just as much a departure from the historical norm as Trump was.  There has never been such an exceptionally long-tenured politician who achieved the presidency

Trump’s also the first President with direct ties to Joe McCarthy and his more secretive successors.

[StateBoiler]

Slightly OT, but the trivia piece that Trump is the first president "elected without military or political experience" has always seemed a bit weird to me.

Like, are there actually any meaningful similarities in the experiences of Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, Dwight Eisenhower or Herbert Hoover, for example?  Lumping them all in as having "military of political experience" seems very reductionist

P.J. O'Rourke once had something like this satirical picking on Hillary Clinton (in addition to the rest of the Obama administration who were getting destroyed in the geopolitical game by the Russians and Chinese, some things never change). Her accomplishment as Secretary of State was she visited hundred some odd countries. He then compared that "accomplishment" to other Secretaries of State and how hardly any of them left the country to do it. It's kind of a credibility laundering using the office to make yourself sound more prestigious than what you actually did. Actions matter more than titles in other words.

From 2014:

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pj-orourke-orwell-was-right

Then Came Hillary Clinton Who, as Secretary of State, Traveled to 112 Countries…

Which makes for an interesting point of comparison with some of America’s other famous diplomats.

William Seward…

The Secretary of State under Presidents Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Johnson skinned the guy who used to have Putin’s job (Czar Alexander II—he was assassinated). Seward bought Alaska for 2 cents an acre. Plus, he crafted the Lyons-Seward Treaty, joining the U.S and Great Britain in suppressing the international slave trade. Seward never, to my knowledge, went anywhere. He stayed home and got some work done.

The Same for John Hay…

Secretary of State under Presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. Without leaving town, he negotiated the end of the Spanish-American War and the treaties making the Panama Canal possible, and he authored the “Open Door Policy” that prevented China from being divvied up by Japan and the European colonial powers. (P.S. His boss Teddy won the Nobel Peace Prize for doing something—making peace between Japan and Russia.)

Charles Frances Adams…

Lincoln’s ambassador to the Court of St. James almost single-handedly kept Great Britain from allying with the Confederacy during the Civil War. He went to just one country, Great Britain, to do it.

And Robert R. Livingston…

President Thomas Jefferson’s ambassador to France traveled only to France. He came back with the Louisiana Purchase.