I wanna say two things:
First
There is no such thing as true "liberals" or "conservatives." There are times where liberal policies are needed, and there are also times where conservative policies are needed. If you study these presidents punctiliously, you'll see that their views on many issues deviate from what you'd think a typical "liberal" or "conservative" would hold.
Great presidents are ones who:
- Know how to adapt depending on the situation of the country.
- Have staff/administration who know what they're doing.
- Are open minded.
- Knows the important of addressing his or her people.
Second and more importantly
Presidents themselves don't know everything; they have staff or administration who do all the work. If you look at the education of most our presidents, they have degrees in business, political science, government, economics, law, etc etc. I wonder how many of them have erudite backgrounds in degrees in science, engineering, health, technology, etc.
As an engineering student I may be a bit biased about this but there is a severe lack of experienced engineers running our country. We've got politicians, businessmen, economists, lawyers running our country who know nothing but money money money. For years our nations infrastructure needed a severe makeover but nobody listened. And guess what happened because of that?
Hurricane Katrina
One can point fingers at Bush, others can point at the Louisiana/New Oreans leaders, hell some can even blame God for bringing this natural disaster upon everyone. But these are all secondary. This entire catastrophe could have been severely mitigated if the voices of the engineers responsible for the levees and infrastructure of the Louisiana coast could have been heard years and years ago.
For those of you who don't know, levees are man made walls/dams designed to hold back water that rises above the surface. Since the entire city was founded below sea level, these structures are needed in order to prevent water from flooding the city. The designs for these walls are made to hold back around 16-19 feet of flood and storm waters. However, as many of us know, the land which New Orleans was founded on has been sinking over the years, thus the benchmark (the elevation where designs are made and calculated from) lowers. Thus, the levees, build decades ago, which were designed to hold 16-19 feet of water now can only hold 12-14 feet of water. Those few feet spell the difference between typical hurricane damage and thousands of denizens forced to vacate the land forever.
The engineers saw this coming. They told the government about this but what responses do they get? "Oh it's too expensive to add 3 more feet of height to 350+ miles of retaining walls." "The risk is too low, it's not worth our time." All they see is money, they don't understand the ramifications of leaving outdated engineering designs untouched.
Not just engineering either, the health guys too. I have a really good friend who is a medical student and he talks about the arduous work they tackle everyday. The human body is complex, any slight change or modification will make us cease to live. Time is needed for doctors and health professionals to provide adequate service to people. However, when we've got lunatics in D.C. who go on and on about how health care this health care that, 90% of them have no idea what this will do to the doctors and health people who work and study hard to keep our nation alive and healthy.
This is why I never really liked pure business, law, political science, or economic majors. They only know how to run the country (which of course is critical to our nation's continued existence) but they hardly know the consequences of their business or political decisions in regards to the ethics of science, technology, engineering, health, etc. If you look at the people currently running our government, only one or two have engineering backgrounds and I doubt any of them have had any real professional engineering experience.
So to sum it up, Presidents are judged by the people they choose/oversee to run things. More engineers, health professionals, and technology driven people need to get more involved in politics and business so that all of our voices can be heard.
None.