Among Recent Presidents, Clinton is Tops With Historians

[kskiska]

Ask historians to rank the presidents and you will get varied opinions. Limit their choices to only the four most recent occupants of the White House and interesting patterns emerge.

In a recent poll, more than 250 college and university history professors placed former President Bill Clinton as the best president of the last quarter century, Ronald Reagan as the second best, followed by Jimmy Carter and then the first President Bush. (The current president was excluded since his term of office had not yet ended.) The survey also asked the historians to rank the recent Secretaries of State and Supreme Court justices as well as the relative threat to constitutional liberties posed by presidential actions.

Dr. Tim H. Blessing, Professor of History and Political Science at Alvernia College, Reading, Pa., has conducted presidential polls for many years as part of the Presidential Performance Study. Since 2001, he has been joined in ranking presidents by Dr. Anne Skleder, Associate Professor of Psychology. They asked historians, all with doctoral degrees and all teaching full-time at a college or university, to rank these four presidents as "great," "near great," "above average," "average," "below average," or "failing." Using this system, Clinton received the highest average score, though no historian ranked him as one of the "Greats." Reagan garnered a number of "great" marks, but also received numerous "below average" marks, dragging down his score and indicating that he is still a polarizing figure.

For Carter and Bush, "losing the confidence of the people" during their terms contributed to their trailing numbers. "A one-term president does not have the time to collect successes and move up in the ranks," Blessing and Skleder note. They also suspect that the waning popularity of the current President Bush may have caused a slight "suppression" of his father's ratings. Likewise Carter's rating might have been still lower had it not been for a "lift due to his post-presidential humanitarian activities."

What makes a president rank above others is how well they embody the hopes and dreams of the people. "Sometimes, people don't know what they want," Blessing claims. "What presidents mean to the people is more than the sum of their policies. Presidents who can voice the people's hopes and ideals and help them give voice to their aspirations" rank highest.

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/usnw/20070310/pl_usnw/among_recent_presidents__clinton_is_tops_with_historians

[ShortnFiery]

1. Unfortunately his spouse can't put HIS credentials on HER resume.

:shrug: This applies how?

[reprobate]

2. What? Bush isn't No. 1? To the camps with these people. Unpatriots.

[DavidDvorkin]

3. Reagan ahead of Carter is absurd

More time will have to pass before those skewed perceptions get corrected, I suppose.

[melody]

4. Amen n/t

[brentspeak]

5. Which isn't saying a whole lot, considering his competition.

And Clinton screwed over the American people by signing NAFTA.