Of Presidential Failure

That doughty chronicler of the world press, The Week, recently devoted a module to a discussion of whether the outgoing president was the worst president ever.  I’m sure that most were surprised that the question was even thought to be worth asking, and, yes, the only contributor identified as a historian indeed said that he was the worst president ever.  I was a little surprised that they could find any dissent at all, but two National  Review types were so aghast at the suggestion that they managed to leave the impression that we were losing a pretty good president.  Well, some people liked New Coke, too.

It all brought back fond memories of my junior high Social Studies classroom.  I am certain that my instructor would be very pleased to know that I enjoyed the Chart of Presidential Greatness he hung on the wall so much that I remember it very well after all these decades have passed.  The downside of my affection is that I have resisted with obstinacy any attempts to shuffle the ratings over the years.

Occasionally, my pique has been substantive, most notably with that leader among leaders Grover Cleveland, who was demoted already from his spot in the Near Greats in the first surveys to Above Average, and, I am sure, has since receded into Average.  It’s a shameful fate for the only man that John Q. Public missed so much they had to have him back.  But for the most part, I suppose my reaction is attributable to my love of stasis and dislike for presidents wobbling around in the chart of my dreams.

I suppose I could go research some of this, but I fear that looking on the internet would only reveal that there now are many presidential greatness surveys out there and it would be difficult to find the descendent of the original, initiated in World War II days by the elder Arthur Schlesinger.  Thus, I don’t really know who’s where right this minute, but I’ve picked up hearsay.

For example, the aforementioned historian cited the competition for worst president as Jas. Buchanan, Warren Harding, and Franklin Pierce, which, if accurate, would verify something I’ve seen coming for a while, viz., Ulysses Grant getting promoted out of the Failures, on the grounds that he was marginally less hostile to BIPOCs than his contemporaries.  Nonetheless, he was a failure indeed and shall remain so to me: corruption is corruption.  As for Pierce and Buchanan, they were on the chart in the Below Average category along with Herbert Hoover and perhaps some others, and I am sure that their demotion is the culmination of increasing attribution to them for the onset of the Civil War.  As for Harding, he seems to be a feature of the Failure category despite a few ripples a couple of decades ago, perhaps facetious, on the grounds that he was a donothing, which we apparently could use more of, and that he presided over a pretty good decade for literature.

As with most bell curves, the broad middle interested me less, though, having come through the lower grades being indoctrinated with the hoary truism that we as Americans should treasure Honest Abe and The Father of Our Country above all other mortals, I was perplexed to find Washington in there with a shedload of Averages.  Much, much later (like a couple of years ago), I learned from a semi-academic writer that this was attributable to his second term, when the departure of the great minds from his cabinet left everybody a peek behind the curtain and when he went all Dick Nixon against those who disagreed with his policies.

At the other end, a syndicated columnist out of Pittsburgh whom I read recently set out his hopes for the term of President Biden through the prism of our Greats, in which he included Reagan.  If indeed Dutch has found his way into the Greats, I’ve been made a fool of, since I was roundly chastised at a party in the eighties for declaring that the staunchly liberal historians who decide the survey would never let him rise beyond Above Average, if that.  I might save a little face by pointing out that the same crowd was ridiculing me for not knowing that Truman was now a Great and that Eisenhower already was.  Well, perhaps Ike is in there now (he was similarly namechecked in the aforementioned column), but I doubt very much if Truman is in there, and if he is, there’s been a mistake.  I see his administration’s good points, but if you leave office with a 12% approval rating, you’re not a great president, period.

Now, myself, I’m a voluble opponent of presentism in all its forms, and I’ve never thought that presidents should be put into this survey at all until they’ve been out of office for twenty-five years or so, but I’ll make an exception and speculate that it seems quite impossible to me that the forty-fifth president will be remembered as anything other than a Failure, and, yes, our worst president.  If I’m reading anything different fifty years from now, then we’ve gone further down the Idiocracy road more quickly than anything Mike Judge or I thought possible.