From Wikipedia:

Quote:

Various administrations have closed in gloom and weakness ... but no other has closed in such paralysis and discredit as (in all domestic fields) did Grant's. The President was without policies or popular support. He was compelled to remake his Cabinet under a grueling fire from reformers and investigators; half its members were utterly inexperienced, several others discredited, one was even disgraced. The personnel of the departments was largely demoralized. The party that autumn appealed for votes on the implicit ground that the next Administration would be totally unlike the one in office. In its centennial year, a year of deepest economic depression, the nation drifted almost rudderless.

I looked that up after reading this article at The New York Times. Being a 'war hero' sure is no recommendation to being President.


Party Guy

By SARAH VOWELL
Published: September 6, 2008

FORMER Senator Fred Thompson, in his folksy and entertaining speech at the Republican National Convention on Tuesday night, described his party’s presidential nominee as such a rule-breaking scamp that for a minute there I thought he was nominating Tom Sawyer for president instead of John McCain. When Mr. Thompson described Senator McCain’s progression from Naval Academy cut-up to war hero, all I could think about was a ne’er-do-well West Point cadet bound for military distinction, Ulysses S. Grant.

In the 1868 presidential election, when the American people voted for Grant, the greatest war hero of the 19th century, they had no inkling they had just chosen one of our worst presidents, a largely clueless chief executive who allowed corruption to flourish in his administration and who offered pretty much zero leadership during the depression known as the Panic of 1873.

I am not merely pointing out that military fortitude does not necessarily lead to presidential wisdom — sometimes it does. The nation’s capital that the Republican Party loathes so much is named after one such gentleman. My point is way more obvious and disquieting. No matter how much we voters know about a candidate, the truth is we never can tell what kind of president he’ll be.

Senator McCain has been both lauded and derided as a “gambler” for choosing the obscure governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, as his running mate. That’s nothing compared to the sucker bet the American people are forced to make every four years. For instance, who knew that Herbert Hoover, who had been such a heroic do-gooder for the Belgians during their food crisis of 1914, would turn out to be a president blatantly blasé about Americans who were starving during the Great Depression? And what was it like to turn on the radio in Kansas City on Aug. 6, 1945, to hear the news about Hiroshima and realize that the commander in chief who gave the order to unleash the most terrifying weapon in the history of the world was the guy who used to sell you your hats? Follow-up: How did Harry Truman draw on his executive experience as the proprietor of a haberdashery to decide whether to vaporize a town?

One of my biggest fears about the current president back in January 2001 was that he would fail to make good on his campaign promise to eliminate the National Park Service’s $4.9 billion deferred maintenance backlog. Seven years later, the nicest way I can describe how things turned out is that the park service backlog — now around $8 billion, by the way — is no longer one of my top 50 anxieties about the state of the union.


More at: The New York Times

Given some of the people that had been advising McCain on the campaign trail and also some of his speeches and talks that I've seen, I could see there being a lot of corruption within his administration. The worst part is that he wouldn't have any idea it was going on as he seems oblivious to nearly everything going on around him most of the time, so he would find out at the same time the rest of the world did, when it hit the news.