Journalists love to make use of previous presidents to measure at present’s politicians, both to construct up those that exemplify their historic liberal heroes, or to belittle conservatives with whom they disagree. So on this President’s Day, right here’s a deep dive into the MRC’s archives exhibiting how the media have used presidents from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to JFK as speaking factors in at present’s political battles.

When Invoice Clinton confronted impeachment within the Nineteen Nineties, for instance, the media found that our third President Thomas Jefferson was actually “a ’90s form of man” who might give the forty first President some wanted political cowl. When Hillary Clinton was making an attempt to cover her position within the lethal Benghazi debacle, MSNBC’s Chris Matthews argued FDR was simply as “secretive and manipulative” but additionally (to Matthews) “most likely the very best president we ever had.”

Alternatively, Ronald Reagan was derided as akin to “ineffectual Dr. Feelgoods like William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge who swam with the tide of their occasions,” and George W. Bush was lumped in with post-Civil Struggle leaders “Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland — presidents who can be remembered solely in a blur of failure.”

It’s much less about precise historical past and extra of a lesson about how liberal journalists need you to see American historical past and present-day politics:

■ “I wish to say that, in some methods, Barack Obama is the primary president since George Washington to be taking a step down into the Oval Workplace. I imply, from visionary chief of a large motion, now he’s obtained an govt place that he has to carry out in, in a manner.”
— ABC Nightline co-anchor Terry Moran to Media Bistro’s Steve Krakauer in a February 20, 2009 “Morning Media Menu” podcast.

■ “[Senator John McCain has] completed it [picked Sarah Palin] at nice price, as a result of the entire Republican conference…was going to be the slogan, ‘He’s not prepared to steer,’ that means Barack Obama. Properly, Sarah Palin makes Barack Obama seem like John Adams. I imply, it’s simply, it’s no contest.”
— Newsweek’s Howard Fineman on MSNBC’s Countdown, August 29, 2008.

■ “May a brand new genetic examine suggesting Thomas Jefferson fathered a baby with a slave be a lift for President Clinton in preventing impeachment?”
— CNN anchor Marina Kolbe, October 31, 1998 The World At the moment.

■ “If the check outcomes imply Jefferson is now thought to be what one scholar calls ‘a ’90s form of man,’ the White Home have to be smiling. In spite of everything, if Invoice Clinton’s favourite President might find yourself on Mount Rushmore and the two-dollar invoice, regardless of being sexually energetic with a subordinate, it’d put Mr. Clinton’s conduct with a sure intern in a special mild.”
— NBC reporter Bob Faw, November 2, 1998 Nightly Information.

■ “Sure occasions with George Bush there appears to be an irrelevancy, or he will get one thing improper. We identified yesterday he referred to Benjamin Harrison dying of pneumonia after a cold inauguration day, and naturally it was William Tyler Harrison who died.”
— NBC White Home correspondent John Cochran botching a reference to William Henry Harrison throughout dwell protection of George H. W. Bush’s inauguration, January 20, 1989.

■ “He [George W. Bush] has all the time countered criticism with the idea that historical past will show him proper, but some presidential historians are already saying that President Bush may need handed the James Buchanans and the Richard Nixons to turn out to be the worst president ever.”
— Keith Olbermann on MSNBC’s Countdown April 21, 2006, introducing an interview with left-wing historian Sean Wilentz, creator of a Could 4 Rolling Stone cowl story asking if Bush is “The Worst President in Historical past?”

■ “After we return, which social gathering would Abraham Lincoln be a part of at present? Would he nonetheless be a Republican after all of the discuss states’ rights and honoring the Confederacy?…Who do you assume represents the spirit of Lincoln in at present’s politics and who doesn’t, not a bit? You name it: The Democratic Social gathering of Barack Obama, or the one which’s speaking up secession, placing down Common Grant, singing about states’ rights and pining for them good outdated days?”
— Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, April 8, 2010.

■ “A [Mitt] Romney takeover of the White Home may effectively rival Andrew Johnson’s ascendancy to the presidency after Abraham Lincoln’s assassination in 1865….Johnson stood by as Southern states enacted ‘black codes,’ which restricted rights of freed blacks and prevented blacks from voting. Romney stood by final yr as Republican-controlled state legislatures handed voter-identification legal guidelines, making it more durable for individuals of shade, senior residents and folks with disabilities to train their basic proper to vote. “
— Washington Put up editorial author Colbert I. King in his November 3, 2012 column, “Mitt Romney may very well be the subsequent Andrew Johnson.”

■ “I learn the e book [My Life by Bill Clinton] utterly. And I believe it compares very favorably with Ulysses S. Grant’s gold customary of presidential autobiographies.”
— Dan Relatively on CNN’s Larry King Reside, June 18, 2004.

vs.

“Whereas Dan Relatively, who interviewed Mr. Clinton for 60 Minutes, has already in contrast the e book to the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant…,My Life has little of that basic’s unsparing candor or historic perspective. As a substitute, it devolves right into a hodgepodge of jottings: half coverage primer, half 12-step confessional, half stump speech and half presidential archive, all, it appears, hurriedly written and much more hurriedly edited.”
— New York Instances e book reviewer Michiko Kakutani in a June 20, 2004 front-page critique of My Life.

■ “[Vice President Dick] Cheney has helped, sir, to make your administration into the sort our ancestors noticed within the 1860s and 1870s and Eighteen Eighties, those that deserted Reconstruction, and despatched this nation marching backwards into the pit of American Apartheid. Grant, Hayes, Garfield, Arthur, Cleveland — presidents who can be remembered solely in a blur of failure….You, sir, haven’t any enterprise being President.”
— Host Keith Olbermann addressing President George W. Bush in a December 6, 2007 “Particular Remark” on MSNBC’s Countdown.

■ Historian Clay Jenkinson: “There’s no query that Roosevelt is an imperialist. Apologists wish to attempt to play this down. However the truth is he’s most likely probably the most vital imperialist in American historical past….There’s a blood lust in Theodore Roosevelt. He was a killer. You’ll be able to’t sanitize that….”
Ex-Newsweek editor Evan Thomas: “Teddy Roosevelt, though he’s an exquisite determine and a glamorous determine, is a harmful determine in some methods. This glorification of conflict can’t be a great factor in the long term.”
— From the primary installment of PBS’s documentary sequence, The Roosevelts: An Intimate Historical past, September 14, 2014.

■ “100 years from now — lengthy after Ronald Reagan has been lumped with different ineffectual Dr. Feelgoods like William McKinley and Calvin Coolidge who swam with the tide of their occasions — the final fourth of the twentieth century can be remembered for the demise of imperial communism, and the Soviet Union’s President [Mikhail Gorbachev] can be remembered for each making and letting it occur.”
— Boston Globe Washington bureau correspondent and columnist Tom Oliphant, December 28, 1989.

■ “[George H. W.] Bush was saddled with a number of the supply-side voodooism of the Reagan period, however simply as Herbert Hoover couldn’t escape the excesses of Warren Harding and doltishness of Calvin Coolidge, nobody will even keep in mind the dish that Bush was served up by Reagan….Reagan was not the president of Morning in America, he was president of the free lunch. He gave us progress, however the associated fee was borrowed cash, greater than a trillion {dollars} of debt.”
— Retired Boston Globe Washington Bureau Chief Robert Healy, October 11, 1990.

■ “Franklin Roosevelt — most likely the very best president we ever had, definitely within the twentieth century — was very secretive and manipulative, and we nonetheless thought he was a great president. So if Hillary Clinton is secretive, we all know that, is that going to assist us get any additional right here?”
— Host Chris Matthews on MSNBC’s Hardball, Could 21, 2015, discussing Hillary’s Benghazi scandal.

■ Host Tim Russert: “You instructed The New York Instances one thing I discovered very attention-grabbing and let me simply learn it for our viewers. ‘We outline the character challenge so narrowly. My concept of a terrific president is a man who cheated on his spouse in such a harmful manner it just about ended their marriage, drank a pitcher of martinis each night time, cheated at poker together with his associates, lied to his employees, sicced the IRS on his enemies, and my father voted for him 4 occasions: FDR.’”
Former Newsweek author Joe Klein: “That was inaccurate, my father identified to me, it wasn’t him, my grandfather voted for him. Nevertheless it’s true, it’s completely true.”
— Alternate on CNBC’s Tim Russert, August 9, 1997.

■ “If I needed to decide the very best presidents in my lifetime, I’d in fact decide Roosevelt and Kennedy, and I’d additionally decide Harry Truman.”
— ABC’s David Brinkley in The Washington Put up Journal, April 10, 1988.

■ “[It] happens to me we’re sitting thirty ft from Harry Truman’s official White Home portrait. Members of your base are asking: ‘When are you going to get your Harry Truman on?’”
— Brian Williams’ inquiries to President Barack Obama in an interview proven on the NBC Nightly Information, September 12, 2011.

■ “George W. has reverted to the Republican fiscal insurance policies of Ronald Reagan, those his father characterised as voodoo economics….President Bush ought to have used a special presidential mannequin: Dwight Eisenhower, whose fiscal self-discipline stored the financial system rising and inflation underneath management.”
— U.S. Information & World Report Editor-in-Chief Mortimer Zuckerman concluding a March 12, 2001 again web page essay.

■ “At the moment, the audacity of hope had its rendezvous with future. The Kennedy clan anointed Barack Obama a son of Camelot.”
— ABC’s David Wright on the January 28, 2008 World Information, reporting on Ted Kennedy’s endorsement of Obama.

■ “You recognize, I believe that the distaste that individuals might really feel for this [Monica Lewinsky story] can even be due to the truth that the probing into this individuals non-public life has occurred. I believe previous presidents, Lyndon Johnson for one, definitely Jack Kennedy, this stuff went on, you recognize, libido and management are linked.”
— Newsweek’s Eleanor Clift throughout dwell MSNBC protection on January 21, 1998, reacting to fees Invoice Clinton had intercourse with a White Home intern.

■ “If Nixon symbolically represents Iago, consistently plotting revenge on his enemies, then the Kennedys, first the daddy and now the son, are the modern-day embodiments of Icarus. Of their love for motion and journey, within the charisma that effortlessly radiated from their each gesture, the Kennedys will all the time characterize the triumph and supreme tragedy of flying too close to the solar.”
— USA At the moment “Hype & Glory” columnist Walter Shapiro, July 21, 1999.

■ “For Ronald Reagan to journey off into the sundown unscathed by the Iran-Contra affair is completely unfair to Richard Nixon. What Reagan, his Cupboard and employees did to the nation was a lot worse than what price Nixon his presidency.”
— Former Boston Globe Washington Bureau Chief Robert Healy, January 22, 1994 column.

■ “Let’s not debate his presidency, however his passing. Versus a person like Reagan, Nixon is, was extremely thought to be a real statesman with a first-class thoughts.”
— NBC’s Bryant Gumbel on At the moment, April 26, 1994.

■ Correspondent Lesley Stahl: “When all is claimed and completed — and plenty of can be stunned to listen to this — Jimmy Carter obtained extra of his applications handed than Reagan and Nixon, Ford, Bush 1, Clinton or Bush 2.”
Former President Jimmy Carter: “I had the very best batting common within the Congress in latest historical past of any president, besides Lyndon Johnson.”
— Alternate on CBS’s 60 Minutes, September 19, 2010.

■ “In lower than two years, Invoice Clinton had already achieved extra domestically than John F. Kennedy, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush mixed. Though Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan usually had their manner with Congress, Congressional Quarterly says it’s Clinton who has had probably the most legislative success of any President since Lyndon Johnson. Inhale that one.”
— Newsweek Senior Editor Jonathan Alter, October 3, 1994.

■ Co-host Joe Scarborough: “If you’re evaluating it to different presidents, you may have a look at LBJ. You’ll be able to have a look at Ronald Reagan. You’ll be able to have a look at Invoice Clinton….The checklist of accomplishments for Joe Biden and this Democratic Congress in a extremely divided local weather simply appear to continue to grow.”…
MSNBC’s Manner Too Early host Jonathan Lemire: “It does rank up there with any fashionable president, the variety of laws completed.”
— MSNBC’s Morning Joe, August 8, 2022.
    
■ Co-host Bryant Gumbel: “Properly, in a while this morning we’re going to be speaking on this President’s Day about this presidential survey. Who would you assume completed first?…Of all of the presidents once they did first to worst. Oh c’mon, you’d know.”
Co-host Jane Clayson: “Ronald Reagan.”
Gumbel, dropping his pen: “First?!?!”
Clayson: “Who was it?”
Gumbel: “No! Reagan wasn’t even within the high ten. Abraham Lincoln. Possibly you’ve heard of him.”
— Alternate on CBS’s The Early Present about C-SPAN ballot of historians which ranked Reagan eleventh, February 21, 2000.