Siena College does itself no favors in terms of reputation with its recently released Survey of US Presidents. The poll of 238 presidential scholars ranked Franklin Roosevelt as the greatest US president while current chief executive Barack Obama came in at No. 15.
Rounding out the top five: Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. At the bottom: Andrew Johnson, the Reconstruction-era president who was impeached in 1868.
Obama’s two immediate predecessors, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, came in at No. 39 and No. 13, respectively.
Presidents were ranked on six personal attributes (background, imagination, integrity, intelligence, luck and willingness to take risks), five forms of ability (compromising, executive, leadership, communication and overall) and eight areas of accomplishment including economic, other domestic affairs, working with Congress and their party, appointing supreme court justices and members of the executive branch, avoiding mistakes and foreign policy.
Besides the obvious glaring mistake of ranking anyone in front of George Washington – never mind Franklin Roosevelt – it’s hard to fathom how any “presidential scholar” can possibly gauge Obama’s performance after just 18 months in office.
A better grade for Obama would have been, as David Boaz of The Cato Institute points out, an incomplete. Not because of agreement or disagreement with the current president and his policies, but because scholars are supposed to take a longer-term view of history.
One might argue that it takes at least a generation to even begin to properly assess a president’s impact. To rank a sitting president within spitting distance of the top one-third of all chief executives after just a year and a half is ludicrous.
Of course, the Siena poll also rated Woodrow Wilson eighth. That’s the same Woodrow Wilson whose ivory tower diplomacy played such a key role in the disastrous Treaty of Versailles and contributed so crucially to the horrors of World War II and the Cold War. ‘Nuff said.
Boaz says the problem with such surveys is that “presidential scholars love presidents who expand the size, scope and power of government.”
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