It seems to me that the most recent/current unpopular president is always going to be the worst president in peoples' minds because the country has had decades, or centuries, to absorb the mistakes of their previous (probably worse) leaders.
That said, I swing between feeling bad for and disliking Andrew Johnson.
Nah, this one is the worst. Definitely 
Yeah, dubya gets my vote for worst ever.
I taught intro. college courses in U S History for the last seven years (adjunct). The question is one I've been toying with since Reagan. I don't think it easy to compare presidents before, say, Lincoln to more recent ones: the job is so different.
That being said, there have been several Presidential trainwrecks, some for incompetence (Harding comes to mind,) others for malevolence & the harm they did to the institution and the country (all together now, NIXON,) and some both (Reagan.) I lived through the last two, and was never driven to violate the rule to wait till the dust settles before making a judgment. Until now.
W has won, hands done, in one term. We should rename the trophy after him: the G. W. Bush award for the worst president ever.
Words escape me now (I'm at work focusing on things non politic), only the knowing remains that he is the worst ever.
There are different categories of bad presidents. George W. Bush has failed in all spheres of the presidency as did Ronald Reagan.
However, Harding, Coolidge and a few others were equally ineffective.
On the subject of Andrew Jackson, I will say that personally I believe he was a bad president for condoning the Trail of Tears and for ignoring a Supreme Court ruling. On the other hand he was the first president to throw out the previous guy's cabinet and install his own.
Nixon was awful for his legal problems (as in he believed he could do whatever he wanted regardless of the law), but he ended the official elimination of Native American tribes (as political entities), so he's not so bad there.
Proximity to the present may be clouding my judgement on Bush and Reagan, but I still say they are the worst.
There's such a vast array of styles and degrees of suckiness that it's hard to choose. It's hard to imagine that W is the worst EVER, but I do think he (and his administration) may have set a new precedent for cockiness--especially in the video/photographic era. Even Nixon who came off as (at best) mildly psycho in televised confereces, etc, at least pretended to care what the public thought of him.
I think that as the number of people one is responsible for increases, the amount of harm that can be done them increases as well.
GWB is "responsible" for a greater number of people's welfare in this country alone than either Nixon or Jackson. Therefore, in his failure to be a good president, he is the Worst Ever.
The Trail of Tears was bad, but Jackson dispelled the First Bank of America and made our nation financially independent of the European bankers. Of course, it didn't last forever and now we have the Federal Reserve.
Bush is definately the Worst Ever. Who else has threatened to veto a military spending bill that prohibits torture? Who else has supported forced drugging of children under the "New American Freedom" initiative? Has declared martial law over a hurricane and is threatening it for avian flu? National ID cards? What is this society turning into?
I don't think I know enough to have an opinion about worst president ever. I was about to say that pre-emptive war is the national policy ever, but I don't know if it's quite as bad as genocide against the people who were on this land before we got here.
I think the extreme Democrat-vs-Republican polarization we have now is what made it possible for someone like Dubya to get the support and money that got him elected. A lot of credit for that polarization goes to Reagan and the New Right.
I think W has grabbed the trophy. Susie Madrak laid it all out better than I ever could - see http://susiemadrak.com/2005/11/2...atter-of-trust/
I'm completely confident that W is the worst of my lifetime. I didn't live through the Pierce administration.
Incidentally, there are historians who have been re-assessing Harding and suggesting he was actually okay.
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Mmmm, I have to go for W. His blatant willingness to rewrite history as it's occuring is something I've not seen before, even in Nixon and Reagan. Sure, they all lie; but this one openly punishes those who disagree with him; openly changes environmental reports to reflect "science" that supports his corporate cronies; openly censors the government and the American people in a way that frightens me.
It's a close call for me between the Shrubster and Benjamin Harrison, who cut a backroom deal during a disputed election to become president. The deal involved withdrawing federal troops from the southern states, effectively ending Reconstruction and dooming blacks to another hundred years (at least) of second-class citizenship.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the two worst both came to office in disputed elections.
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