David's Challenge

Namely, to name a president greater than Ronald Reagan, limited to the last 140 years, since we know that Lincoln blows everyone out of the water. I mean, listen to Lincoln...listen to his music:

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

Here is another:

Neither party expected for the war, the magnitude, or the duration, which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered; that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes.

No president, and indeed, few writers in the English language have approached it.

Who, after all, are the greatest writers in the English language? I mean this in a very specific sense...those with the best prose-style.

Here is a short list...

1. C.S. Lewis
2. Abraham Lincoln
3. F. Scott Fitzgerald
4. Charles Dickens
5. Shelby Foote
6. Tom Wolfe
7. Thorton Wilder

Additions?

Oh, back to presidents. I really do not see how you can dispute with David's choice in the last 140 years. Certainly not with that vastly over-rated pair of inbred East Coast aristocrats, Roosevelt and Kennedy. You could make a case, however, for Calvin Coolidge and Teddy Roosevelt. And on a good day, Harry S Truman.