Barack Obama... the Fourth Greatest President?

It's almost unbelievable that Obama could be so tone deaf as this.   A smarter politician would have deflected the question easily, saying (as George W. Bush) would often say, that history would decide long after he was gone whether what he had done was good or bad, right or wrong.   But Obama chose to tell Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes that he believes that his administration's first few years have seen more accomplishments than any other President with the possible exceptions of Lincoln (!), FDR and LBJ:

Really?  Even on it's face this makes no sense.   Put aside the chutzpah of claiming to be a better President than George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or Theodore Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan.   As a matter of history this is extraordinarily shallow and silly.   What were FDR's foreign policy accomplishments up to December 1935?   I don't recall any.   And during the first three years of his Presidency, LBJ presided over the escalation of the Vietnam War?  Is that really what Obama thinks of as a great accomplishment?   Did anybody in December 1967 really think LBJ's Presidency had been such a rip-roaring success?   If so, it might be news to most of the left-wing of the Democratic Party.   And, as for Lincoln, at this point in his first term (December 1863), the war was dragging on, and there was serious doubt that he would be reelected, or that the war would be concluded victoriously for the North.   To be sure, Grant had just succeeded in breaking the Confederate Army at Chattanooga, but the carnage of the summer of 1864 awaited (the Wilderness, Spotsylvania, Cold Harbor, etc.).  

 

Obama '12:  I'm the Greatest... Just Ask Me!