Wait until Newt hears about this!

And I'm not a historian, or a constitutional law lecturer, but I can sure as heck name lots more than 3 additional ones that I can say what they did.

One comment perhaps on another thread attacked poor Chester A. Arthur, an accidental President and one of the most unpopular in his own time. Could be he accomplished something rather remarkable. To be fair he accomplished several things that set him apart from the other 43 who have held that office. There is also something else that he did that stands apart from both his predecessors and some of his successors.

Chester Arthur was an accidental President via being a compromise choice for the Vice Presidency, an assassin's bullet and the most serious case of Presidential medical malpractice. Technically the bullet did not kill James A. Garfield. His doctors did. The bullet lodged in his shoulder. Had they left him alone to recuperate, he would have lived. Instead, they tried for over a month to dislodge the bullet, failed to do so and in the process weakened him and the infections took his life. In hindsight, we are lucky that Garfield died for otherwise the most competent and selfless man, in my view, ever to hold that office would have never held it.

Chester Arthur was one term President because his party hated him. He ended the cronyism of the GOP that run the country since "Useless" Grant. He was put on the ticket because he was reformer from New York who did battle with the political machines such as Tammany Hall. The Civil Service Act of 1883 was his doing. That is his legacy. Arthur also gave us the first comprehensive immigration reform opening the doors to increased immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe. How many of your ancestors came to America because of Chester A. Arthur? I suspect quite a few. It is true that to get that he was forced to accept the Chinese Exclusion Act that banned Chinese immigration for the next sixty years. There were trade-offs even then. Sad but true. But don't think him a racist. Because the other great legacy of Chester A. Arthur was that he stopped the genocide of the American Indian. He was the first President to visit the West, sitting down with tribal leaders and getting securing protection for them from the US Calvary. Unfortunately, Benjamin Harrison, who only ventured out of the White House to go duck hunting, reversed that. The massacre of the Lakota and the Sioux came on Harrison's watch.

Which is something that Jimmy Carter certainly was able to do, by the way.

Ours is a highly technological society, so we need Presidents who understand technology.

clearly, not having a clue about what more than maybe 10 presidents did, or perhaps are best known to history for isn't a compelling argument (on its surface, anyway) against the sen.'s presidential bona fides. however, you might think he'd done at least a cliff's notes scan of all of them.

given his tenure as a constitutional law instructor, i'd think he'd have a pretty good sense of what the first 16 dealt with. maybe they never mentioned the names of the presidents, when he was teaching. seems odd though.