Is Obama One of the Worst or Best Presidents?

By Tom Kando
 
On August 18, 2011, Matt Patterson published a vicious  hit piece against President Obama in the Washington Post.  It continues to be widely circulated on the  Internet, often  misleading the readers  that it’s the Washington Post  which feels this way about Obama. In fact, the paper only printed this  in an attempt to be fair to “the other side.” 

Patterson’s  thesis, based on what Norman Podhoretz had written  earlier, is that  Obama is an incompetent nincompoop, our first affirmative action President, voted into office solely because of his race. The claim is that  Obama may be our  worst President ever,  and that his election was the result of misguided liberal white guilt and  mass hysteria among the electorate.
Patterson  not only claims that Obama is a disastrously incompetent President, but that he also failed to achieve anything  of value during his earlier academic and political careers.

My purpose here is hardly to rebut Patterson’s absurd statement, but to playfully suggest a ranking of US Presidents:

As to the hit piece, just this: it is a furious  rant, utterly lacking  any facts or evidence, and often describing  Obama in a manner  precisely the   opposite of reality: Patterson says that without a Teleprompter the President  is speechless, can’t think clearly, is devoid of ideas, speaks in clichés, is narcissistic!

Is Patterson confusing Obama with George W. Bush, or what? Isn’t the opposite obvious - that Obama is a  Spock-like man who possesses superior rationality, cool detachment and problem-solving capabilities? 

Patterson accuses Obama of blaming his predecessor for the country’s problems. To the contrary, the President  has so much class that he does not do this enough, despite inheriting the worst mess in 70 years.

As to the most obscene accusation - Obama is an affirmative action president:

Patterson and Podhoretz reiterate the oft-heard cliché that affirmative action is racist. 

One thing is a lot clearer: The true racists are  those who cannot conceive of a person of color achieving something without the help of affirmative action!  If a black man reaches a high position, it must be due to affirmative action, right?  What utter hogwash.

Actually, the shoe is entirely on the other foot: It is the  George W. Bushes and the  Mitt Romneys of the world who are utterly unqualified, yet are admitted to Yale, Stanford and Harvard solely because of their family’s  blue blood and despite the fact that they couldn’t have passed my Sociology One class.

Space does not allow  me to list Obama’s  achievements, but any semi-informed person knows that they are considerable, despite inheriting the George W. Bush disaster and the worst Republican obstructionism in  history. While it’s too early to tell, I predict that Obama will go down as one of our country’s top 10 Presidents.

And now, I offer you my ranking of  our country’s 43 Presidents:

Such rankings are usually done  by “experts” such as History and Political Science  professors,  and journalists.  My rankings are based  on my own very limited knowledge plus   rankings by  the eminent historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr., and articles such as a   Spring  2007 Newsweek cover story.  Obviously I had to deal with Obama without the help of Schlesinger or Newsweek:

Criteria include  such things as the conduct of war  (e.g. Washington, Lincoln, FDR), major social legislation (e.g. Lyndon Johnson), peace and prosperity (e.g. Eisenhower), making a mess of things (e.g. George W. Bush, Jimmy Carter).

Bias and subjectivity are unavoidable.  For example, no one can disagree with Arthur Schlesinger that George Washington was  better than Richard Nixon. But how bad was  Richard Nixon?  Apart from  the Watergate scandal,  Nixon made some  positive contributions, for example the opening to China.

In the table below, Presidents receive a score ranging from 0 to 10, and I then group them into four categories: the 14 best, the 10  middle, the 10 worst, and  9 whom I was not able to rank. 

Table I: U.S. Presidents, Grouped and Ranked from Best to Worst

Best Fourteen	1	Franklin Roosevelt	10
	2	Abraham Lincoln	10
	3	James Madison	9
	4	Thomas Jefferson	9
	5	George Washington	9
	6	Barack Obama	8
	7	William Clinton	8
	8	John Adams	8
	9	James Monroe	8
	10	Theodore Roosevelt	8
	11	Harry Truman	8
	12	John Q. Adams	7
	13	Dwight Eisenhower	7
	14	Woodrow Wilson	7
Middle Ten	15	Andrew Jackson	6
	16	John Kennedy	6
	17	George Walker Bush	6
	18	Lyndon Johnson	6
	19	Ronald Reagan	6
	20	John Tyler	5
	21	Grover Cleveland	5
	22	James Carter	4
	23	Richard Nixon	4
	24	Gerald Ford	4
Worst Ten	25	Ulysses Grant	3
	26	James Garfield	3
	27	Calvin Coolidge	3
	28	Zachary Taylor	2
	29	Andrew Johnson	2
	30	Herbert Hoover	2
	31	Warren Harding	1
	32	James Buchanan	1
	33	George W. Bush	1
	34	William Harrison	0
Don’t know(Nine)	35	Martin Van Buren
	36	James Polk
	37	Millard Fillmore
	38	Franklin Pierce
	39	Rutherford Hayes
	40	Chester Arthur
	41	Benjamin Harrison
	42	William McKinley
	43	William Taft

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