The Best "Worst President": What the Right Gets Wrong About Barack Obama

by Mark Hannah, Bob Staake (Illustrator)

Overview

Political analyst and Democratic campaign veteran Mark Hannah and renowned New Yorker illustrator Bob Staake give Barack Obama the victory lap he deserves in this compendium that takes the president’s critics head-on and celebrates the president’s many underappreciated triumphs.

Barack Obama’s election in 2008 was a watershed moment in American history that inspired supporters on the Left—and fired up enemies on the Right. Elected in the midst of multiple crises—a Wall Street meltdown that imperiled the global economy and American troops entangled in two foreign wars—Barack Obama’s presidency promised, from the start, to be one of the most consequential presidencies in modern American history.

Although he stabilized the economy and restored America’s prestige on the global stage, President Obama has been denied the credit he deserves, receiving instead acidic commentary from political opponents such as former Vice President Dick Cheney, who declared that Obama was “the worst president in [his] lifetime”—an accusation that reflects the politics of resentment and recrimination that has come to characterize the president’s critics.

In The Best "Worst President", Mark Hannah and New Yorker illustrator Bob Staake swiftly and systematically debunk conservative lies and disinformation meant to negate the president’s accomplishments and damage his reputation—baseless charges too often left unchallenged by the national media. The Best "Worst President" is a whip-smart takedown of these half-truths and hypocrisies, each refuted in a smart, witty, fact-based style. Hannah and Staake not only defend the president but showcase his administration’s most surprising and underappreciated triumphs—making clear he truly is the best “worst president” our nation has ever known.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780062443052
Publisher:	HarperCollins
Publication date:	06/28/2016
Pages:	336
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.40(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

Mark Hannah is a veteran of John Kerry’s and Barack Obama’s presidential campaigns and a Democratic political analyst who has appeared regularly on FOX News, MSNBC, and CNBC. He has written political analysis for PBS.org, The Huffington Post, and Politico and currently teaches at New York University and The New School. He holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University and the University of Southern California. A native of Cape Cod, he now lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Bob Staake has written and/or illustrated more than sixty books, including The Red Lemon, a New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Children’s Book of the Year. He has been a cover artist for The New Yorker since 2006, and his November 17, 2008, Barack Obama victory cover was named the Best Magazine Cover of the Year by Time magazine. He lives on Cape Cod, in Massachusetts. You can visit him online at www.bobstaake.com.

Editorial Reviews

2016-04-06
Barack Obama: dictator; secret Muslim; al-Qaida operative. If you've heard this sort of thing and want to argue against it, political consultant Hannah offers a useful primer.It's a useful thing indeed to have a compendium of opposition charges about, say, Obamacare being "an unmitigated disaster" or Benghazi being the modern Watergate and responses to them, especially since the Obama administration has seemed so uninterested in advancing those responses on its own hook. Hannah, a specialist in message-crafting, looks in turn at the usual conservative charges, beginning with the overarching first premise: namely, that Obama is a dictator, inclined to go it alone without the advice and consent of Congress and independent of reference to the Constitution. Nonsense, Hannah writes, even though "this line of argument actually [has begun] to resonate with the American people," having been repeated ad infinitum on Fox News. The reality, writes the author, is that given an intransigently obstructionist Congress, Obama "has not been bashful about his use of executive orders"—even though Obama has used the executive order less than any other president since Grover Cleveland, who left office in 1897. But why did Obama pursue the much-hated bailout of Wall Street? Because Congress authorized him to do so, if perhaps not down to the last dime. But it didn't work, did it? It did, and instead of making Wall Street into a socialist extension of the Federal Reserve, "the president invested in a market-driven…solution." Seated next to a Bill O'Reilly-spouting uncle, readers of this completely reasonable book might sound like the voice of reason, but that begs the question: is there room in the current din for anything that's not a shout, and is anyone going to listen anyway? Veteran illustrator Staake provides the visual accompaniments. A little late in the coming, since we'll soon be arguing about a new president. Still, a useful look back over eight years that, depending on your point of view, were the best of times or the worst of times.

Kirkus Reviews