The New Hailing of the Chiefs

C-SPAN recently came out with a ranking of all the US presidents, which is an updated version of the one the Wall Street Journal did in 2000. Presidential history is one of my minor hobbies, so I was very interested in the results. There are also separate rankings on various qualities.

Here is a link to the lists.

Voici...my commentary. Remember, there are only 42 men ranked as Grover Cleveland is counted twice in presidential order and Barack Obama's only been president a month.

The overall list: Not surprisingly, it's changed very little. Most of the presidents barely moved on the list. Only a few moved more than two spots, and only two would I consider big leaps. Those are:

Bill Clinton - Up six spots to #15. That makes sense I guess, since he's the most recent president to appear on the list twice.
Ulysses S. Grant - Up ten spots to #23. Can't really explain this, but he's still in the bottom half of the list, so it's still okay.

And where's George W. Bush? Coming in at #36. Beating out Fillmore, Harding, W.H.Harrison, Pierce, A. Johnson, and Buchanan. We're talking a low position here. Will he rank higher over time? I doubt it, based on his ranks on the other specific qualities.

• Public persuasion - 36
• Crisis leadership - 25 (A 9/11 bump, but it couldn't stand up to Katrina and a tanking economy)
• Economic management - 40 (Just over Hoover and Buchanan. Clinton is #3 on this one.)
• Moral authority - 35 (Clinton's 37. Heh.)
• International relations - 41 (Only beating out William Henry Harrison, who spent the entirety of his month-long administration in bed dying of pneumonia)
• Administrative skills - 37
• Relations with congress - 36 (Dead last here is Andrew Johnson, who took his vice presidential oath drunk and basically told off all of congress afterward.)
• Vision/Setting an agenda - 25 (It's one thing to have a vision and agenda, another to accomplish it. Remember a year ago when W pledged to have peace in the middle east by the time he left office?)
• Pursuing justice for all - 24 (Why is Clinton, Mr. Don't Ask Don't Tell, at #4?)
• Performance within context of the time - 36

There you go. Some of these still need more time to fully settle in history, but I don't think there's any way that the recently departed for Dallas can bubble up into the top half of anything.