It takes an expert — a huge collection of them, as it turns out — to rank the president who won the Cold War without firing a shot lower than the alleged president on whose watch war broke out in Europe and the Middle East and threatens in the Pacific.
Just in time for Presidents Day (and I'll get to that absurdity in just a moment), The Hill's Sarah Siock breathlessly reported on the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey conducted in the closing weeks of 2023, and "included current and recent members of the Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics."
Oh. Well then. Their decisions must have been inscribed by lightning on tablets formed from the stone of Mt. Sinai.
According to the Very Official Survey of People Much Smarter Than You Are, Joe Biden is the 14th-greatest president in history, two spots above Ronald Reagan and just one step below founding father John Adams, who (mostly) kept our young country out of war.
Barack Obama, who opened the door to trillion-dollar stimulus bills that we still can't get rid of, was ranked seventh, right in between Harry Truman, who ended World War II in the Pacific with two shots of the Blinding White Light of Freedom, and Dwight D. Eisenhower, who presided over an unprecedented peacetime boom after winning World War II in Europe.
The top three spots were filled out by Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, and George Washington. Any survey that doesn't have Washinton in the Number One spot is such obvious BS that its stink would be notable in an abattoir. As Don Surber noted on Monday:
We talk about our Founding Fathers — some now dismiss them with the genderless label Founders — and it is true that Adams, Franklin, Jefferson, Caesar Rodney, Elbridge Gerry, and a hundred more men did the work. They were willing to sacrifice their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor to build a new nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and endowed by the Lord with certain inalienable rights. But these Englishmen would never have been able to become Americans without a great leader. The only choice was Washington, and boy did we luck out with him. He could have been king. He chose to be a servant.
Indeed.
FDR was one of our great wartime presidents, albeit marred by poor diplomatic decisions as the war wound down, particularly at Yalta, as his physical and mental stamina sharply declined — sound familiar? But FDR was also one of our worst peacetime presidents, authoritarian, wrongheaded, and whose New Deal turned a nasty recession into a decade-long Great Depression.
Lincoln is our second-greatest president, end of story.
Our worst presidents, battling it out for last place — and I don't care which one goes where — are James Buchanan and Woodrow Wilson. Buchan fiddled while the country slid into the Civil War, and Wilson was a virtual dictator and an effective segregationist whose Progressive politics helped give us the income tax, Prohibition, and the ever-expanding federal behemoth that FDR would come to fully weaponize.
You will not be shocked to learn who placed dead last, behind even Buchanan.
That's right, it's Donald Trump. We got three pretty dang good years out of Trump, including rising wages, the Abraham Accords that brought official peace between Israel and a growing host of Arab nations, and a solid start to decoupling from Communist mainland China.
But Orange Man Bad, you see. Because experts. What would we do without them?
Imagine there's no experts — it's easy if you try.
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