the. economic down in the final. days. and the rest. will be a briefly. hello and welcome to crossfire all things are considered i'm peter lavelle u.s. president barack obama's public opinion ratings are in the doldrums now called a lame duck by many he may finish his days in office as one of the country's worst in least effective presidents how do historians and the public determine the

success or failure of an american president and why are some presidents rehabilitated years or even decades after they leave office. to cross-talk the worst american presidents i'm joined by my guest samuel put to leakey zero in moscow he is the president of the preparing global leaders foundation and a visiting professor at georgetown university in washington we have doug he is a presidential historian and a former white house advisor to two american presidents and in boston we cross to robert mir he is a core lecturer in history at columbia university all right gentlemen welcome to the program crosstalk rules in effect that means you can jump in anytime you want and i go to doug first in washington you know lot of people when you look at presidents the history of the presidency it's either thumbs up or thumbs down or you forget everybody else where is barack obama standing these days lot of people call me a lame duck already we know his public opinion poll numbers are low is he going to

be in the bottom rank. it's too early to say he's going to be a very significant presidents because he's the first african-american president so it's going to be a real linchpin in history so i don't know that historians will take a long time before historians can look at him objective lee as a president because it's so history breaking i mean the founding fathers wrote all men are created equal and many of them had slaves so this was a great. landmark in american history and he's going to be his election is going to be viewed as a great moment regardless of how this presidency is if you don't ok bob if i can go to you i'm a lot of people said that about jimmy carter the most important thing about his presidency that he was elected in the first place after that it was all downhill bob where do you stand in on this because i agree with what doug had to say but i think the american people have gotten used to the fact that barack obama is an african-american and he's there to rule he was voted twice to rule the country to

be the chief executive and the public is saying right now he's not doing a very good job i think that we're all historians here and there's no doubt that historians like to take a long view so it's true that in the broad picture it's too soon to say i think we can all agree on that however it seems to me that some of the basic sort of frames for analysis are typically the economy war and justice when presidents are evaluated and so by that standard considering the economic wreckage that barack obama inherited and the fact that the stock market is up and people are going back to work there's a lot of potentially positive historical let's say material that people will will will will will analyze there's also the question of the two wars one of which has been concluded the other one of which appears to be on the way to being concluded and finally on the issue of justice i think there you may find a wide wider spectrum of opinion questions about whether president obama has done everything he set out to do questions about income inequality and wealth. wealth

inequality in the country and how that will play out certainly will provide rich fodder for people like those we have on the program today as well as legions of others in the historical and analytical fashions ok sam here in moscow how do you judge the presidency thoughts far of barack obama is he going to be in the lower ranks with george w. bush in film or in buchanan the most unpopular or in considered least successful failure presidencies well i think a lot is going to depend on the several variables whether or not he finds iranian gorbachev whether or not the economy continues to pick up speed and what happens with obamacare and the sixty five or ten years to probably evaluate but if you look at past elections as in nate silver did a great job of this to try to predict where obama would come out he comes out being about the seventeenth best president if you run a regression analysis on election results which is just a notch ahead of bill clinton so i think he is the possibility to potentially be

a democratic reagan and be a top twelve president but if the economy doesn't do too well or some of the foreign policy issues blow up in his face you could definitely find himself to be an average or below average president. you know it's doug it's very interesting that the election his election and his jumping ahead i was going to say his election is is surely extremely significant but c.n.n. at c.n.n. institute actually ranks him as the fifteenth greatest president i think that's absurd absolutely ridiculous i mean we've had the largest group disparity now between rich and poor under barack obama the numbers are just awful but history is not always fair and historians are not always fair so i think it will take a long time before american historians view him objective and if it's viewed on data it is not a successful presidency and we haven't mentioned the killing of a u.s. citizen this son of a lockie that that's a remarkable turning point for us in a nation in my opinion we're almost in

a post constitutional period in america after nine eleven and i don't i think it's too early to get a feel for where obama would be kind of stretch the limits right here i mean i would tend to agree with doug and we were kind of in the imperial presidency but it certainly didn't start with barack obama we could go all the way back to the end of the second floor but bob you know you know ronald reagan for example if you look at his presidency carefully i had a lot of problems too we had a huge scandal on his hands and when you brought up the issue of justice we could look at what was happening in central america in dealing with friendly dictators to washington but at the at the at the end of the day ronald reagan is almost considered the the mold of a great presidency why is that why because he was a leader or people perceived him to be a leader or they disliked him i think that the issue of ronald reagan being considered in the mold of

a great president is one that many people disagree with certainly there is a lot of senate busy as him for that but when i think of great presidents i really think of people like abraham lincoln that had. bring the country together thomas jefferson who sort of stood above a time of really brutal partisan warfare you might say almost reminiscent even more extreme than what we experience today people who brought the country together so by that standard i think that history perhaps is a useful lens through which to look at the presidency of obama even now because really the value of history is giving perspective and learning from the past so i'd be really interested in the opinion of the panelists and. viewers through e-mail on that aspect of obama's presidency to me it seems that he has unify the country an important respect suffering many controversies most importantly he's restored economic prosperity at least to some degree although as we've observed the rising inequality threatens the long term stability of the country and its economy i would

say beyond that he also has issued various kinds of clarions for social justice some of which have been accomplished many of which have not i think that words matter and the president's power is not just one of us to to stick but also one of leadership and of setting an example and by that standard i think that obama may be judged to have accomplished far more than it seems at precisely this moment ok so how do you think about that because i mean you're an expert in leadership in and i think this what it gets down to at the end of the day a successful president and successful presidency is the ability to lead because if we look at franklin roosevelt i mean he didn't end the depression the depression was all the way up to the first world war but people he gave people hope and this is what's really interesting he really reached across so many different different divisions and it didn't mean that the country became you know a whole lot better i mean the depression lasted a whole decade and it took the second world war to end it but he's considered on

the same pedestal for most people f.d.r. ronald reagan abraham lincoln washington we heard jefferson as well i mean it's a leadership quality. a lot's going to pen on what prism he will be viewed through and i think that's very important to understand it he styles and self after abraham lincoln in you now it's his campaign a very audacious campaign in four years from the unknown state senator to a united states presence a pretty bold move and you know i think one of the things we might want to look for . bob mentioned social justice is the equality of opportunity the american create announced in the declaration of bennett's as equality of opportunity he is the first african-american president in some ways completes the constitution but he's taken some pretty bold stances on gays in the military and also same sex marriage and a generation from now that actually could be a very significant moment in his presidency ok doug how would you reflect about that because again you know it is

a lot of people will look at obamacare for example do you think that will be the centerpiece of his presidency and and if it is that still the jury is out that's right i think the presidency of george w. bush is going to be judged based on what happens in iraq and doesn't look very good and the presidency of barack obama will be judged eventually on obamacare and i just like to say i'm hearing the panel talk about the great american economy our economy is in a mess we are we have corruption in washington d.c. on wall street on k. street we have corruption like we've never had it in this country i mean we have the lot of the federal reserve our central bank in two thousand and eight in the midst of the economic crisis showed sixteen trillion dollars introduced to the american economy at a time when the entire national debt was twelve trillion that is devastating to the

elderly it's devastating to the poor it wiped out a whole generation of middle class it eventually had devastating impact on real estate our economy's a mess and. so i think you can you can you can say that this is a great economy right now it's a great economy if you're rich and we're trying to get the what with wall street cranked up again if you've got all your money in stocks it's beginning to show a little life it's not if you're an average person in this country ok bob how do you reflect upon that because i would i have to tend to agree with doug i mean i see a lot of public relations here i don't see a lot of really good policy for the average person i agree with a lot of what doug said i met my my only point really was comparing the economy today with the economy in two thousand and eight i think probably we can agree it's improved relative to that i just like to pick up on an earlier point that doug made though which i also thought was quite important and significant especially insofar as historians can provide value by looking for trends and putting things in context

which was the assassination of a u.s. citizen overseas really you might say the power of the king to have life or death over their citizens without without an open trial and i think that in the sense of a trend there is more continuity gentlemen we're going to have to jump in here we're going to go to a short break and after that short break we'll continue our discussion on the american presidency stay with r.t. . there were millions of dollars moving from

a company in saudi arabia called sharpie fruit or fruit company and they were sending money to one of the leading members of the muslim brotherhood in yemen so this is what. is allowing then facilitating to do that to happen here that causes political instability in the region and that causes i mean that's fine it's trees in its financing our enemies and what's crazy about it is that each s.p.c. admitted to the department of justice and to the world they've made it treason financing the enemy if you plead guilty to financing the enemy i don't think you should just walk with a fine that's not final let's kill. on

june sixteenth one thousand forty one we had a graduation party at school and the war broke out. the shops were always full of goods. in september leningrad was blocked. one day mom wanted to sort out all the shoals were empty. in november the. warehouses it was the main storage place for all the food in the city people eating the earth because it had small traces of sugar in it i tried to eat it as well but i couldn't. get the burglary was incredibly heavy bombing. it was a directory a very shelter and everyone was bare. to me. all of them.

welcome back to cross talk we're all things are considered on peter lavelle to remind you we're discussing the worst presidents and the best presidents of the united states. ok sam i'd like to go back to you what what president does barack obama. remind you of can you name one one that he is the mutilating of successfully or unsuccessfully . i think he's aspiring to be a democratic reagan i think he's someone who has had a number of bold policies particularly with obamacare he's inherited

a great recession he's had to face two wars that he inherited so i think that is probably the president that he wishes to be and he mentioned this in his initial campaign in two thousand and eight really got under the skin of the clintons when he made that comparison to ronald reagan it's very interesting doug it seems like any president now that wants to be successful has to be one variant of ronald reagan one way or another because we saw the clintons you know bill clinton tried very much and same thing even george w. bush did and need at least imagery in language maybe not necessarily in policy but perception and in politics perception is about ninety nine percent of the job that's true and particularly they like to copy reagan's lack of guile he just wouldn't answer back he wouldn't fight back and he insisted on remaining good natured and and you see obama doing that perfectly keeps he keeps his temper under control i am a little irritated though in all of these discussions when we talk about the reagan

economy and we talk about reagan's foreign policy the cold war was on and today it seems like we have a hawks and doves and they don't even know that the cold war is over it's kind of like they've developed this persona and this attitude of wanting war and wanting fighting and so they've perpetuated it even beyond the cold war or whatever is going on for that if it involves military action and that brings up the whole issue to me is the corruption of the military industrial complex i mean we now have under barack obama we have troops on the ground in australia so here we are borrowing money from china to defend australia against china by putting. troops on the ground that has nothing to do with geopolitics that has to do with some pentagon contractor making money off the u.s.

taxpayers and we've always had corruption in america we've never had it to this extent i meeting people from central america south america who come here who are alarmed i had someone the other day said you know in my country fifteen families kind of rule the country you can't get a franchise without permission i come to america because it's free but i have eventually find out it's just become corrupt on a much more sophisticated scale and that's troubling to me ok bob it's very interesting to me because when we look at since the second world war f.d.r. to the presidency to the current president barack obama there's this this institution in the executive branch here in reflecting upon what doug has just said here i mean how much of it is a just in office for special interests i mean how much room for maneuverability is there for the president to get an agenda through because it seems to me it's getting narrower and narrower for

a president and so that means that kind of takes the personality or the content of of the person out of the equation because the presidency is a certain box and you have to operate within it and you know if you want to have a nice face and you want to be indomitable like ronald reagan that's all fine and that's all for the cameras but how about for historians i mean how how powerful is to presidency today well you touched on one of the central an age old questions of history i mean tolstoy to to use a local hero put it as as great men are just labels and events and although they have the perception that they change things they really only reflect larger changes i think to respond to your earlier question that obama. models himself i mean he did self consciously or early in his. pain that we discussed on abraham lincoln and in the sense that at least as many people view lincoln he was a transformative president who set the entire country on

a new path which is an incredibly you know you can say are dangerously ambitious goal and i think that some of the conversation and some of the discussion that we're having reflects the tension between those enormously high aspirations yearning you might say for fundamental change and the reality of our system of government which is one of checks and balances and really retards change to a significant degree cutting back to your question about the power of the president i think that it's a combination of individual. personality and also events around one by that standard obama i think has fallen short of some of his most ambitious aspirational rhetoric ok doug i'd like to go back to you in washington with just how powerful is the president today because you know i looked at it we could look at the rhetoric from two thousand and eight to the president to the president and it looks like the popular the the populist. words of faded i mean certainly

a lot of progressives truly disappointed in the president's agenda and if you look at civil rights we look at you know if he didn't know what was going on in the n.s.a. it kind of gets back to what people said about ronald reagan either you're lying or you're stupid i mean this is a paradox here that maybe he just didn't know about it ok he should know about it gives the president well i have a different opinion than some because i personally knew a man doing well and he became president i was surprised course all of this is your point of reference i was surprised at how powerfully he impacted events on the world stage i told my wife in one thousand nine hundred ninety eight or ninety seven when the first poll came out showing george w. bush governor of texas as the front runner for the republican nomination. i told my wife a while if he gets elected president we will go to war with iraq

and we will kill saddam hussein and we will kill his sons his two sons because i knew george w. bush and they tried to kill his father and that happened i i saw all the news stories saying well what does iraq have to do with nine eleven what's going on here and i saw it happen and i can tell you if you're president there's there's thousands of little people certainly they could little cubbyholes right memorandums and one of them is right and what you want to hear and that will just come to you. like bees to molasses and you will have a rationale for what you want to do so while it's true that many presidents express their frustration and can't do some of the things they want to do over the heads of their own bureaucracy it is also true that a president can have devastating power in directing world events and i believe that george w. bush did ok well i don't i have met too many people that thought it was

a successful presidency but we have to remember the american people voted him into office twice sam it's we go through and over the new year's holiday i read a very long volume of the history on the american presidency and the conclusion of the book asked the question is it getting harder and harder to become a successful president considering all of the vested interests we look at the military industrial complex i don't know how much brock obama is running his foreign policy and if he is it's a disaster for the united states and i don't see a whole lot different than george w. bush but apparently he's a different party and have a different point of view so my question is how hard is it to be a successful president these days what personality is is huge for the presidency i want to say that first me look at the way that obama gets elected he loses to mitt romney an poll exit. well fifty three forty five on who can handle the economy and that was the most important issue in the election but he won the most important question in american politics which is who do you like more who would you rather

get a beer with fifty six to twenty seven there are three main strengths right now for an american president the first one is i think the structural system of presidential ism lin's who is a famous political scientist at yale passed away almost right on the eve of the government shutdown he said that presidential ism won't work and the reason why is you have a congress and a president that are elected separately but have to govern concurrently so they both have legitimate claims to the office and right now we have two very distinct parties you might even say polarized in one thousand nine hundred two in the house of representatives of four hundred thirty five members three hundred forty three of them had some ideological overlap in two thousand and two that number went down to one hundred thirty seven and now in two thousand and twelve that number is thirteen so it's very difficult for an american president a democrat a republican to be able to reach compromise are going to be persistent conflicts he's going to be handcuffed he secondly there's a falling trust in public institutions today a poll just came out from gallup saying that the most important problem in the

united states is the government twenty one percent the second most is the economy at eighteen percent and then finally the president if faces some demands from the media i think the bully pulpit has been weakened i think because of the fragmented off audience the proliferation of different technologies he needs to constantly be on he's over exposed he's talking all the time and that makes for a more particular society where people feel they're almost on the same plane as a leader and that undermines some leadership qualities you know bob i'd like to go back to you on this question of likability because i think unfortunately that may be the defining issue because i mean when you judge a president right after he leaves office but there are other trends here i look at harry truman harry truman left office hated i mean his poll numbers were awful but now you know you see the his portrait in the in the in the oval office is one of the great presidents how did that happen. i think it goes to speak to the power of events people want to have a president that they can like but what they really want is

a president who can deliver and it's not always clear at the exact moment in time how things will play out so harry truman for example is considered a very tough minded person who took decisions that helped shape a world that ultimately worked to the advantage of america over the long term and therein lies a lot of his popularity even if he wasn't the most the most welcome friend around the bar for a lot of people in the country i think that the broader issue and the trend which is a place that history can really help helpfully advise is the dysfunction of the current system of government that we have i mean let's remember that abraham lincoln many others have described our system as an experiment the exist this is to me the united states is an experiment and one that continues to play out its great virtue is that it. is a system of checks and balances where it's hard to amass all right if you're only a fascinating discussion fortunately we've run out of time many thanks to my guests

in moscow washington and involved in and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at r.t. see you next time and remember topples. leave . tonya well a day well tell me how you want my little grandson. i don't like i don't like. being cut off. except it doesn't mean. that the spiritual side is destructive.

i tried to convince her try to preach that it was a sect but it's dangerous and she had to leave it was a story she had lost her mind. you know you she will come back i know it was and i will wait but even if it means i must wait until my dying day. as a new physician i swear to avoid by the hippocratic oath. to the best of my ability and judgment. i will prescribe for the good of

my patients. i will not give deadly doses to anybody. of those to do so. i will never do harm to the. doctors of the dogs. there were millions of dollars moving from a company in saudi arabia the fruit company and they were sending money to.

the leading members of the muslim brotherhood in yemen so this is what. is allowing that in facilitating today to happen here that causes political instability in the region and causes i mean that's the it's treasonous financing our enemies and what's crazy about it is that each p.c. admitted to the department of justice and to the world they've made it treason financing the enemy if you plead guilty to financing the enemy i don't think you should just walk with a fine. fine that's. good leverage to. mission to teach me.

home made. overnight. a revolution. do not repeat the fate. the voice of the opposition is supported by the e.u. which has the authority. to blame. the un. or the country's main opposition group says it will drop out of the negotiation. and syria's president said the upcoming conference must focus on terrorism above all else. contribute to the spread of jihad.