Name your favorite political leaders of all time.

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Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gandi)
Nelson Mandela (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nelson_Mandela)
Cyrus the Great (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_great)

Clinton I
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Some props to be given to Hoover as well.

Because the ladies seem to be underrepresented here:
- Eleanor Roosevelt
- Boudicca
- Bella Abzug
- Empress Theodora
- Elizabeth I
- Queen Nzinga
- Queen Rania
- Wu Zhao
- Golda Meir

And for sheer batshit craziness, you can't beat Elizabeth Bathory.

I'm amazed that so many people like FDR despite the fact that he was essentially a fascist (which most people don't really know/understand) and the closest thing to a dictator we've ever had in the United States.

But if I had to name a few:

Martin Van Buren
Grover Cleveland
Andrew Jackson
Thomas Jefferson
Calvin Coolidge
Julius Caesar
Otto von Bismarck

American:
Thomas Paine
George Washington
Thomas Jefferson
Franklin Roosevelt

Other:
Pericles
Tiberius Gracchus
Mohandas Gandhi
Nelson Mandela
Marquis de La Fayette
Aung San Suu Kyi

Gandhi
Nelson Mandela
JFK
Thomas Jefferson
Ben Franklin
Abbie Hoffman
Golda Meir
Elizabeth I
Eleanor Roosevelt
Abraham Lincoln

Well, my daddy used to protect him in the White House!

Seriously, "no good man is all good, and no bad man is all bad " (Krishna, to the Pandavas, referring to the dying, evil Duryodhona, at the end of the Mahabharata war).

Roosevelt was a complex character, in a complex and very dark age. I always had an intuition about him as a great man, though in time grew to a greater understanding of his character, time and place. I agree there is a tendency to have a superficial view of our historic leaders.

He had to act outside legal limits during the beginning of WWII, while we were still neutral; if Britain fell, the balance of world power would shift disasterously, and he violated neutrality by providing "lend-lease" and other aid until we entered the conflict.

I would not simply write him off as a mere fascist; he was more complex than that.

I really liked Ike, he warned the American people in his farewell speech "Beware the Military Industrial Complex"! And, he didn't seek a career in politics.

Peace, Johnpipe

Ghandi ! !! !!

Jesus, Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day, the anarchists of Barcelona,

A great leader knows what is the right thing to do and can non-coercively influence followers to do the right thing against their apparent immediate self interest.
























b

Well, most Presidents do tend to be complex figures. You could make an argument that he "had" to act outside of the legal limits of his power to stand against Germany in a military sense; however, you cannot make this same argument in the domestic economy, where I would argue he bent or violated the law the most (and made more and more people worse off, and yet people still worship him today almost unquestioningly).

Too bad we don't have a surplus to pay off the debt of the current war anymore... Now we keep getting the same BS about the economy being strong when we don't even have a single penny saved up to show for it.

I'm not saying that a surplus should just lay there unused. By all means, invest the money on hand. However, it's always good to have some real value on hand to inject into the economy if it starts to falter... similar to all those "stimulus packages" we keep hearing about, but with the money already available to the government instead of having to dig our nation more into debt to fund such initiatives.

There's only two ways a national economy can die:
1) hyperinflation
2) government borrowing its way into bankruptcy (which is what the soviets did)