u’d have figured largely right.<\/a> <\/p>\n\n\n\nFrom top to bottom, with my comments interspersed:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1<\/strong> Lincoln<\/strong> – Couldln’t see that one coming…
2 FD Roosevelt <\/strong> – Are you kid<\/em>ding? He prolonged the depression, and gave Eastern Europe to his buddy, Stalin? And he’s <\/em>ahead of…
3 Washington<\/strong> – the guy who could have been king, and chose representative democracy?
4 T Roosevelt<\/strong> – Naturally – a greater triumph of image over Iprogressive) accomlishment than even Wilson. Real shocker there.
5 Jefferson
6 Truman <\/strong> – The victory of Democrat narrative over substance – one of many.
7 Obama<\/strong> – The person who did more to exacerbate America’s decline than any President of my lifetime? Of course <\/em>they put him in the top ten.
8 Eisenhower
9 LB Johnson <\/strong>– The man who went long on Vietnam, laying the cultural groundwork for the modern “Progressive” movement? The man whose “Great Society” destroyed the black Middle Class?
10 Kennedy<\/strong> – The victory of romantic narrative over hard fact.
11 Madison<\/strong> – That he’s this far down the list shows us the APSA doesn’t really care much for federalism.
12 Clinton <\/strong> – Actual intellectual honesty would call for making Newt Gingrich – who was actually responsible for most of Clinton’s success – at least a co-president for purposes of this exercise.
13 J Adams
14 Biden <\/strong>– Biden. A potato. Ahead of Reagan, Adams, Coolidge, and over a dozen merely mediocre presidents?
15 Wilson<\/strong> – Without him, there’d have been no rise of Naziism. No explosion in central power. No federalization of Jijm Crow, and quite likely an acceleration of desegregation. And they put him ahead of…
16 Reagan<\/strong> – …the man who did more than any to bring about the fall of the Soviet Union – which was the only reason Clinton was able to reign in such prosperity.
17 Grant<\/strong> – 17? Perhaps this pack of historians at least figured that Grant had among the toughest jobs a President has had, and generally did well?
18 Monroe
19 GHW Bush
20 JQ Adams
21 Jackson
22 Carter <\/strong>– About 20 places too high. A poor president, and a few Habitat houses notwithstanding, a fairly loathsome ex-president (speechwriter for Yassir Arafat, supporter of Hamas, and a disaster in foreign policy).
23 Taft
24 McKinley
25 Polk
26 Cleveland
27 Ford
28 Van Buren
29 Hayes
30 Garfield
31 Harrison
32 GW Bush
33 Arthur
34 Coolidge<\/strong> – Absolutely criminal. Coolidge was in the top five, in policy terms. More later.
35 Nixon
36 Hoover
37 Tyler
38 Taylor
39 Fillmore
40 Harding
41 Harrison
42 Pierce
43 Johnson
44 Buchanan
45 Trump <\/strong> – Let this be your warning – no matter what your policy accomplishments, mind those tweets!<\/p>\n\n\n\nThe real <\/em>best and worst lists – coming tomorrow. <\/p>\n\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The “American Political Science Association” has released the quadrennial cesspool that is their rankings of American presidents. You may have already figured out it’d be a leftist screed. You’d have figured largely right. From top to bottom, with my comments interspersed: 1 Lincoln – Couldln’t see that one coming…2 FD Roosevelt – Are you kidding? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=87036"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87039,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87036\/revisions\/87039"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=87036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=87036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=87036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}