My fourteen year old daughter last week had a rite of passage: she sat down at a Republican dinner table and was shocked to hear an entirely different (and deranged) take on the Obama presidency. Many probably experienced the same thing around the Thanksgiving dinner table yesterday.
But put your proverbial crazy-Republican-uncle to the side, and have a more relaxed DKos Thanksgiving weekend discussion: where do you think President Obama will place in the historical ranking of Presidents?
All of this is subject, I know, to what could be a number of consequential remaining months. Still, we can begin to consider President’s Obama’s place in history. These historian rankings vary, with many variations out there. Still, for discussion purposes, a (dated) collection of such rankings on Wikipedia (with a caveat as to whether the aggregate methodology is correct) places the aggregate rankings of the top 25 as follows:
- Abraham Lincoln
- Franklin D. Roosevelt
- George Washington
- Thomas Jefferson
- Theodore Roosevelt
- Harry S. Truman
- Woodrow WIlson
- Andrew Jackson
- Dwight D. Eisenhower
- James Polk
- John F. Kennedy
- John Adams
- Lyndon Johnson
- James Madison
- Ronald Reagan
- James Monroe
- Barack Obama
- Grover Cleveland
- William McKinley
- William Clinton
- John Quincy Adams
- George H.W. Bush
- William H. Taft
- Martin Van Buren
- Rutherford B. Hayes
Overall — except as to President Obama — I find this to be a fair starting point for discussions, and it confirms my belief that President Obama will likely be close to (but not in) the Top 10 when all is said and done. And a lot closer than the no. 17 position listed above.
I’ll admit that I will have to catch-up on one-term James Polk (11th president; 1845-1849) to understand how he comes in at No. 10. His separate Wiki page describes him as “the ‘least known consequential president’ of the United States.” (Sounds right, personally.)
Personally, I still find JFK at no. 11 to be a little overrated, and don’t believe I would rate him above Obama.
I suppose whether Obama should be considered a better president than LBJ could be an interesting Democratic debate. My strong belief is “no,” and that without Vietnam, LBJ would be significantly up in the Top 10. So, depending on where others fall, that leaves Obama with a ceiling below the top 10.
I won’t pretend to be able to meaningfully debate where Obama stands in relation to John Adams, James Monroe and James Madison. And while each of them has their unique pluses and minuses, we are talking some rarefied company.
Which, of course, leaves Reagan. I know I would put Obama ahead of Reagan — and have arguments that Reagan was a very destructive president. On the other hand, Obama largely works within the economic, tax, military and international hegemony principles shaped in many ways by Reagan before him. And Reagan — an admittedly influential and effective (at his own goals) president — remains largely a Rorschach test for personal political beliefs. Just being humble here.
All of which means that — depending on how things continue to unfold — I expect that President Obama will go down as between the 11th and 15th highest ranked president. Had he not faced such unprecedented Republican obstructionism, I believe he had the potential to lodge himself in spots now occupied by Truman or Eisenhower. And I think that his current estimation will only rise as time goes by.
But what do you think?