Obama is the worst president in 70 years, says America

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last updated 8 January 2015

President Obama is the worst commander-in-chief since World War II, according to a plurality of Americans.

In a Quinnipiac poll released Wednesday, 33 percent of voters said Obama is the worst president since at least the 1940s. (The question used the end of World War II as its cutoff.) George W. Bush came in a close second with 28 percent, followed by Richard Nixon at 13 percent.

Now, the poll should be taken with a little grain of salt. Recent presidents are expected to stand out on a subjective ranking encompassing many decades because of their temporal proximity. How many respondents weren't even born when Carter ran the White House? Hence, though Obama is named the worst president of the bunch, he's also named the fourth-best.

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That said, the poll is still a brutal one for the president. Fifty-three percent of voters disapprove of his job performance — and a 45 percent plurality say the nation would be better off had Mitt Romney won the 2012 election.

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Jon Terbush is an associate editor at TheWeek.com covering politics, sports, and other things he finds interesting. He has previously written for Talking Points Memo, Raw Story, and Business Insider.