Presidential Report Cards

I have a question about Legacy.

Is the said President being graded held accountable for the way future administrations deal with his policies?

For as much badmouthing as Ryan does to FDR concerning New Deal and how it casts this dark specter shadow across the landscape of 20th Century America, the much more serious specter of slavery hung like the Sword of Damocles from Washington to Lincoln... And blackens the eye of three of the top five Presidents on our list... (If you had Adams on there. I did and I thought everyone else did as well.)

What Washington, Adams and Jefferson do for this nation is inarguable. The black eye of slavery is accurate but in the light of history unavoidable. They weren't kings, they couldn't wave a scepter or a wand and make it so. Compromise after compromise leads eventually to war. It took seventy-six years but the system survived.

So here we are 65 years after the death of FDR looking at a society that DOES NOT have a similiar sword hanging above its head, that IS NOT facing a civil war, that IS NOT about to fail and turn into something the Founding Fathers wouldn't recognize (i.e. a second, seperate nation consisting of almost half the original colonies and well over a third of the geography of the nation at the time) and the main, primary criticism of the man are the SPIRIT of his policies carried to excesses by subsequent administrations. Is what Johnson and Carter enact the fault of FDR? Are Johnson's and Carter's failures FDR's black eye?

If FDR was so bad (as Glenn Beck would have us believe) why was he elected four times? If what FDR did in terms of domestic economics so damaging why did Eisenhower do it eight more years with no problems? (with enormous popularity?)And if he was such a financial idiot, why has there been no depression since 1937?

Were the ideas of Camelot, The Great Society, the War on Poverty, and just about every domestic program that Carter signed off on FDR's fault?