DBWI: Best and worst presidents/PMs after 1900

Well, in the United States, Eugene V. Debs and W.E.B. Du Bois are some of my favorite presidents from the former half of the 20th century and from the latter half of the 20th century, who could forget President Hunter S. Thompson? THey did alot to help grow the USA into a powerful naiton that takes care of its people and accomplished alot.
 
OOC: As much as I mess with the concept, i'm pretty sure this doesn't count as DBWI. I've never been terribly clear on the distinction myself but I've seen a lot of argument and mod action against stuff like this when it's called a "DBWI." Just a heads up, in case mods lock or move the thread over that fact.

One of the absolute worst Presidents has to have been Eastwood. Decent actor, but man did he drag the US through the mud.

As far as the best are concerned, he's not THE best, but I'll give Trump major props. It's a shame he only got the one term, but I guess that was inevitable with his being an independent. He was swept into office in extremely insane circumstances, and ironically his stabilizing of the country allowed the mainstream parties to get their shit together and come back swinging. You might say he made America great again.
 
One of my favorites is probably the biggest darkhorse of the 20th century, short of Walt Disney of course-John Nance Garner. His prickly big Texan personality and stubbornness gets some flack, but Garner got America out of the Economic Malaise. While how much of a role he had defusing the Communist Insurrection of 1937 is up for debate and there's some controversy with his attitude towards the Red Scare, it's not up for debate that he kept the peace in America during the 1930s and avoided the chaos of Trotsky's Menace. I think that if he had accepted a third term, the Japanese-American War may have ended sooner.
 

zhropkick

Banned
Mosley was probably the best Labour PM the UK had in the 20th century, he handled the decolonisation of India better than many others would have.
 
Jim Anderton was probably the best 20th Century PM we had in New Zealand.

True, he built well on the groundwork that Rowling's government did in 1975-78, but it was a canny move parlaying all the tax money saved in superannuation into big infrastructure projects in the 1980s.

[OOC: Rowling wins in 1975 with Labour, Anderton is elected as an MP in Auckland instead of running for Mayor as in OTL, Muldoon gets replaced as National Party leader & the compulsory superannuation savings scheme becomes so popular it remains a consensus policy that no Government repeals. National wins in 1978, but Labour returns to power in 1981 with Anderton as leader]
 
One of the absolute worst Presidents has to have been Eastwood. Decent actor, but man did he drag the US through the mud.

Yes, and thankfully he was beaten by his Democratic opponent in 1984, James Dean. Many will know that Dean narrowly escaped an early death in a car crash in 1955; that's a good 'what-if' scenario there. Dean is also quite possibly one of only two non-heterosexual presidents (the other being James Buchanan), if rumours are to be believed.

In the UK, don't get me started on the Enoch Powell premiership. I sometimes wonder whether it would have been prevented had Harold Wilson's Labour lost in 1970. As it was, Heath was ousted by Powell following the 1970 Tory defeat, and Powell led the party to a big victory in the midst of economic upheaval in 1975.
 
The best President was unquestionably Warren G. Harding. While his first term was roiled by scandal, it also saw the unwinding of the economic mess left by Wilson, and he won easy re-election. This was in spite of the Democrats' claim that he was part-black, which was aggressively pushed by their KKK auxiliaries. Harding took personal offense - not that he was repulsed by the possibility, which he privately acknowledged (as in OTL) - but at the insinuations against his female ancestors, and the sheer nastiness of it. The spread of KKK violence, much of it in support of Democrats, also disgusted him and alarmed other Republicans.

This led to the great civil rights work of his second term. The Voting Rights Act, the Civil Justice Act (which criminalized state and local government complicity in lynching), and the new FBI's campaign against the Klan (which exposed the Grand Wizard as a thief and pervert) - all combined to bring down white supremacy in the "Solid South".

The other great achievement of the second term was Repeal of Prohibition. Harding correctly judged that most Americans now recognized that Prohibition was a costly fiasco, and initiated the Repeal campaign in his 1928 State of the Union message. The 1928 elections, both federal and state, became a de facto referendum on Repeal, resulting in Republican landslldes. The Repeal amendment took effect on 15 May 1929.
 
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@ Anarch King: One of the most personally admirable things about Harding was that he owned up to his fathering an illegitimate child with Nan Britton. That was a pretty ballsy thing to do, but given the accusations thrown at her that she was a lying gold-digger it was the right thing to do. Was financially there for them up until his death in 1937

OOC: I'm from New Zealand, however I'm only doing US presidents because I know diddly squat about my own country's history but a whole bunch about US presidents and English royalty
 
The worst British PM was unquestionably Winston Churchill. This is paradoxical, because his career up to becoming Prime Minister was an unbroken line of successes. As First Lord of the Admiralty, he conceived and carried through the Gallipoli operation, which many scholars credit with shortening the Great War by two years. The "landships" developed under his patronage were key to the successful 1916 offensives. Then, as Secretary of State for Ireland, he suppressed the Irish Republican movement by the simple expedient of using only Irish battalions to put down their 1918 "Bank Holiday Rising". He was briefly out of office after the Liberal rout in 1924, but returned to power by rejoining the Conservatives in 1926; as Chancellor of the Exchequer, he resisted pressure to return to the gold standard, which later on everyone realized would have been a dreadful mistake. He was the natural choice for party leader in 1930, and became PM after winning that year's general elections.

And then came the fall: his intemperate opposition to Indian independence, previously dismissed as mere eccentricity, was revealed as an obsession. He ordered the imprisonment of Indian Congress leaders including Gandhi, whose death by fasting in prison disgraced Britain and galvanized Indians. To protect British hegemony, Churchill adopted a "divide and rule" strategy - employing religious minorities, especially Moslems, against the Hindu majority. This ended in sectarian violence all over India, and the death or displacement of tens of millions of people - the worst humanitarian disaster in a thousand years.
 
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For my country, Italy:

Best President of the Republic: Aldo Moro. The elder Christian Democratic statesman and former Prime Minister was elected as President in 1971 (in Home Line Christian Democracy choose Giovanni Leone for one single vote) and realized the Historical Compromise between CD and the Communist Party of reformist Secretary Enrico Berlinguer. He was also a personal friend of Pope Paul VII, an enemy of the Mafia (that was subsequently defeated during Mafia Wars in 1982-1992), a proud Europeist and an unapologetic pacifist. He was author of European proposal against Death and Life Sentences. He is one of most popular Presidents of Italy together with Alessandro Pertini, his successor in office, and Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

Best Prime Minister: Enrico Berlinguer. The young reformist western-minded Secretary of Italian Communist Party is a widely popular figure in Italy: after the Historical Compromise, he won the 1976 General Election and was nominated PM by President Moro, in alliance with Socialist Party and some minor parties. The Berlinguer a Goverment is remembered for his great social and economic reforms regarding especially healthcare and education system, for defeating the Red Brigades, exposing the P2 Plot and starting the Mafia Wars. Berlinguer's opposition to Reagan Euromissiles is also remembered with national proud. His strongly support for Eurocommunism was the beginning of a new era for European Left: at the beginnings of the 1990s Eurocommunism Goverments were in charge in Greece, France, Spain, Portugal, Sweden and United Kingdom. His death in office in 1984 was mourned as a great national loss and his funeral saw the biggest participation in Italian History.

Worst President of the Republic: Vittorio Feltri. The ultraconservative director of Berlusconian newspaper Il Giornale ("The Journal"), he was chosen as right-wing majority candidate for Presidency in 2013 and subsequently elected. President Feltri is noted for his right-wing partisanship, his racist attacks, his vulgar and offensive language, his insults and his abuse of alcohol. He was widely condemned for his pro-Hitler comments and his death threats to blacks immigrants and others minorities. After his attempt to cancel the Constitution to make a Monarchical Savoia Restoration, in 2016 he was removed by the Parlament for "attack to the Constitution" via impeachment (the only case in Italian History) and arrested. Today he is serving his sentence in a mental asylum and is remembered as the shamest President of Italian Republic.

Worst Prime Minister: Claudio Scajola. A former Christian Democratic Mayor, he was nominated Interior Minister in the Second Berlusconi Goverment. After only one month in office, during the G8 Genoa Riots, he ordered to Police and the Army to open fire against protesters, causing more than twenty-five dead. When the Premier Silvio Berlusconi was bad injured during a New Red Brigades retailation Scajola was able to be nominated new PM and launched a long season of repression: thousands of students were arrested, many universities were closed, hundreds of journalist were barred from their profession and TV channels were put under goverment control. His Interior Minister Francesco Storace was the symbol of political repression: his attempts to assimilate the German Minority in South Tyrol caused great clashes in Europe. An other unpopular act was Scajola's decision to participate to Iraq War. When his new authoritarian constitutional reform was rejected by voters in 2005, a corruption-tainted Scajola was forced to resign in favor of former Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini and subsequently tried in a long and controversial trial.
 

Zharques

Donor
I'm going to go with an controversial pick here, seeing how he is just out of office, but Peter Garrett of Australia is IMO, going to go down as a visionary in the same vein as Frank Forde for his vision in the Second World War.
 
I've got to hand it to President Feingold, that man deserves to be up on Mount Rushmore someday. The way he simultaneously handled the economy following the onset of the Depression and the global clusterfuck the Iraqi-Saudi War had turned into is the stuff of legend. Sure, some people argue that we aren't out of the Depression yet, but gas prices were up to $8.99 a gallon in the first few months after that dirty bomb went off in the Persian Gulf and Saudi oilfields. I'll take $3.99 a gallon every day over that.
 
Liberal Prime Minister Oscar Wilde, serving between 1901-1906 is my favourite. Bringing about radical social reforms and devolving more political powers to the National Assembly of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

In my opinion the worst prime minister is Conservative prime minister, George H. W. Bush, now Baron Bush, who served following Margaret Thatcher from 1990-1994.
Many historians blame his time in office for taking the economical views of Thatcherism to the extreme, causing a massive depression to swallow the Bank of England as well as raising taxes causing many in Britain to live and die in austerity.
 
Best at what? Peacetime hands-off leadership like Herbert Hoover, who presided over the "good times" of the 1920s - or peacetime domestic reformers like Harris Wofford, the father of Woffordcare and the man who helped give us the prosperity of the 1990s? Or should you talk about wartime leadership, like Lyndon Johnson in Korea (and of course the last days of WWII) or Larry Pressler during the Persian Gulf War?
 
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