Who to Vote for President?

Tom Kando

The presidential election is coming up. We will have four more years of the same president we had before - either a good and decent octogenarian who is doing his best, who is a normal human being, who is overseeing a country that is doing quite well despite  turbulence overseas and a general domestic malaise, Or an unpredictable weirdo  who is likely to steer the country deeper into right-wing  chaos and extremism.  

The president of the US matters. So I Googled this topic once again. Who were our good and successful presidents, and the bad  ones? One Wikipedia website offers this in the form of metadata:

Twenty-one separate rankings obtained throughout the second half of the 20^th century and the first decades of the 21^st.  

US Presidential Rankings

I summarize the combined results below: 

1	Abraham Lincoln, 1861-1865	16	Ronald Reagan, 1981-1989	31	Benjamin Harrison, 1889-1893
2	Franklin Roosevelt,1933-1945	17	Ulysses Grant, 1869-1877	32	G. W. Bush, 2001-2009
3	George Washington, 1789-1797	18	James Monroe, 1817-1825	33	Chester Arthur, 1881-1885
4	Theodore Roosevelt, 1901-1909	19	George H. W. Bush, 1989-1993	34	Calvin Coolidge, 1923-1929
5	Thomas Jefferson, 1801-1809	20	John Quincy Adams, 1825-1829	35	Richard Nixon, 1969-1974
6	Harry Truman, 1945-1953	21	Andrew Jackson, 1829-1837	36	Herbert Hoover, 1929-1933
7	Barack Obama, 2009-2017	22	Jimmy Carter, 1977-1981	37	John Tyler, 1841-1845
8	Dwight Eisenhower, 1953-1961	23	William H. Taft, 1909-1913	38	Zachary Taylor, 1849-1850
9	Lyndon Johnson, 1963-1969	24	William McKinley, 1897-1901	39	Millard Fillmore, 1850-1853
10	John Kennedy, 1961-1963	25	James Polk, 1845-1849	40	Warren Harding, 1921-1923
11	James Madison, 1809-1817	26	Grover Cleveland, 1885-1889 &1893-1897	41	William Harrison, 1841
12	Bill Clinton, 1993-2001	27	Gerald Ford, 1974-1977	42	Franklin Pierce, 1853-1857
13	John Adams, 1797-1801	28	Martin Van Buren, 1837-1841	43	Andrew Johnson, 1865-1869
14	Joe Biden, 2021-2025	29	Rutherford Hayes, 1877-1881	44	James Buchanan, 1857-1861
15	Woodrow Wilson, 1913-1921	30	James Garfield, 1881	45	Donald Trump, 2017-2021

  

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Israel's Mistake

Tom Kando 

I have always been a strong supporter of Israel. Of its right to exist. Of Jews’ right to have a homeland. Of this homeland existing peacefully side-by-side next to an independent Palestinian homeland. Does this make me a Zionist? I also happen to be Jewish, in the sense that my family on my mother’s side was Jewish. In the last year of World War Two (1945), my grandparents and other relatives were evicted from their homes in Budapest, forced to wear a yellow star, and incarcerated in the city’s Jewish holding centers awaiting shipment to Auschwitz. 

I remain a strong supporter of Israel’s right to exist, but that country is now going in the wrong direction. I am not addressing the moral question underlying the current war in Gaza. My plea stems from fear and a desire for pragmatism 

What Israel is doing right now is not going to work. The country is going the wrong way. I’m not speaking morally. The moral objection to what Israel is doing has been stated clearly by the thousands of marching students all over the US and elsewhere as well as by a majority of the world’s public opinion. 

What I’m talking about here is the future of Israel, and how to make sure that the country HAS a future. Part of the problem is that in this war, both parties’ objective is the total destruction of the enemy. But what Israel seeks is the destruction of a militant group, whereas Hamas’ objective is the destruction of an entire country. 

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Eric Hoffer's view on Israel *

 

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* Eric Hoffer was an American moral and social philosopher. He was the author of ten books and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in February 1983. His first book, The True Believer (1951), was widely recognized as a classic.

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