Who Is The Worst President America Never Had?

To be fair, he moderated his views somewhat toward the end of his life (unlike, say, Helms)

True, but I think that the real problem with Eastland would be that unlike George Wallace (the go-to guy for a segregationist Southern president) he actually was a devoted segregationist who believed every word that came out of his mouth.
 
True, but I think that the real problem with Eastland would be that unlike George Wallace (the go-to guy for a segregationist Southern president) he actually was a devoted segregationist who believed every word that came out of his mouth.

Actually, I think we can agree that most Southern politicians becoming President before around 1970 or so would be pretty dystopic. With a few exceptions of course, LBJ comes to mind.
 
Probably not the worst, but Curtis LeMay. Ran for VP on Wallace's ticket for the American Independent Party, then claimed to be surprised when the press called him a bigot. Among other things, suggested nuking Vietnam and wanted to maintain US first-strike superiority over the Soviet Union.
 
Probably not the worst, but Curtis LeMay. Ran for VP on Wallace's ticket for the American Independent Party, then claimed to be surprised when the press called him a bigot. Among other things, suggested nuking Vietnam and wanted to maintain US first-strike superiority over the Soviet Union.

Yeah. It's hard to do worse than, say, James Buchanan or Woodrow Wilson, but Curtis LeMay would have done worse.

He never ran for the president, but Roger Taney would have been another disaster.

A. Mitchell Palmer.
 
al sharpton and jesse jackson shudders they are both in their own class of pretentious self rightous douche, especially jackson

donald trump, sarah palin, al gore, dan quayle, dennis kucinich, dick cheney, john edwards, elliot spitzer, carol mosley braun, teddy kennedy (all of clinton's worst faults all the time with none of the redeeming qualities as a politician), wesley clark and tom daschle; plenty of gigantic douchebags on that list
 
al sharpton and jesse jackson shudders they are both in their own class of pretentious self rightous douche, especially jackson

donald trump, sarah palin, al gore, dan quayle, dennis kucinich, dick cheney, john edwards, elliot spitzer, carol mosley braun, teddy kennedy (all of clinton's worst faults all the time with none of the redeeming qualities as a politician), wesley clark and tom daschle; plenty of gigantic douchebags on that list
Thats pretty much a perfect list...
 
Overall Worst: DC Stephenson is probably the worst I can come up with on the fly. This is a man who rides the KKK into being Indiana's Governor and is on the political rise. If his abuse of a schoolteacher is somehow quashed, he may well get the nomination.

Runner Up: Aaron Burr--this is a man who may well do anything and wreck the United States for personal power.

Most Likely to fail: John Fremont--The South Secedes; the Border States follow given Fremont's failure to act consistently. This guarantees a rematch of the Civil War by 1900, and quite possibly means Negro Slavery expanding into the middle of the 20th century.

Runner Up: Henry Wallace--For All Time may well be unfair to the greatest Agriculture Secretary the country has ever had, but he's going to have to heavily compromise his idealism to work with congress and probably learn a hard lesson early about the Soviets. I can't rule out an FaT sort of scenario in its entirety.

As little as I like Sarah Palin or Dan Quayle, I'm likely to accept that being a close-minded mental lightweight isn't necessarily a dystopic outcome. We've survived eight years of W; the idea of having more W's in the white house isn't a pleasant thought, but it's far from dystopic.

I also considered the case of WWIII. We already had Ronald Reagan in OTL, so it's probably fair to say that a reckless type probably doesn't cause the missiles to fly. An ultrahawkish figure, like Curtis LeMay, may well start WWIII, but no one actually WANTS the missiles to fly.

The problem is that this ignores the possibility that WWIII could well have started by abysmal luck. Does it mean that RFK is a horrible president if butterflies start a global nuclear exchange for distantly related reasons? I am inclined to ignore anything less than direct advocacy of a third world war. This might be inaccurate, but that's the standard I'll work with. Otherwise the calculations look like this:

Jim Jones (No Nuclear War) > RFK (Nuclear War)

Clearly, banning WW3 from the options is order.
 
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Fred Phelps. *trembles in fear in spite of not being American*

If we're going to include people with no known political ambitions - Phelps doesn't, does he? Please say he doesn't - then I'd like to give a shout-out to General Thomas S. Power, head of the SAC during the Cuban Missile Crisis and a man Curtis LeMay described as "sadistic" and "mentally unstable." He had a lot of good quotes, but one of my favorites is (paraphrasing): "If there's one Russian left and two Americans, that means we win!"
 
Barry Goldwater, he voted no on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. t There is also letting field commanders decide whether to use atomic bombs.
 
Why? Sure he was sleazy but he got shit done.

Huey also was completely and utterly devoted to one thing: Huey Long. He had, at best, an arm's length understanding of foreign policy, and the most likely time for him to be elected would have been in the run-up to WWII, at which point he'd have been decimating the US military to pay for the policies required by his Share Our Wealth coalition. I'm as bleeding-heart as they come, and I love the idea of increasing the wealth available to the poorest members of society, but he would absolutely have been the wrong man at the wrong time. Beyond that, the second most important man in the Share Our Wealth movement was going to be Father Charles Coughlin, who was, at the time of Huey's death, one year away from using his radio broadcasts to openly support and rationalize the policies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.

It's also worth noting that President Long would have has just as much trouble working with Congress as Senator Long did. Huey was a senator for three years, and managed to pass precisely ZERO bills, resolutions, or motions successfully, despite a Democratic majority. I can only imagine how well the country would have functioned gearing up for World War II with a President incapable of getting his bills passed, and a Congress likely incapable of overriding the President's veto.
 
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