I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United States. Barack Obama
I don’t know if everyone has a favorite President, but I do. Two, actually; Harry S. Truman and Ulysis S. Grant. That doesn’t mean that I think that they are the two greatest presidents, I don’t. They are my faves because their stories resonate with me. In both cases, they are regular guys who had the presidency thrust on them and, under rough circumstances, they did a very good job.
In my opinion, President George Washington was our greatest president. What makes Washington so great is that, after two terms in office, he walked away. That is a big deal, a huge deal. He led an army to victory, became president for two terms, and then left. Nobody had ever done that before. Not Alexander the Great, not Julius Caesar, not Napoleon, not anyone. That, in my book, is an excellent reason to say he is number one.
Presidents Day is a strange little holiday, tucked between what used to be President’s Lincoln and President Washington’s birthdays. On this Presidents Day, Brandon Rottinghaus and Justin S. Vaughn took a survey of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association…as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. In other words, a poll of people who care, and are knowledgeable, about who is, or was, a good president.
In the 2024 edition of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, along with Washinton are the top three presidents(in that order). Both Lincoln and Roosevelt held the country together when it seemed an impossible task and they seem like obvious picks. Truman is 6th, right after Teddy Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson. When Truman lost the election in 1952 to President Dwight Eisenhower, he was already unpopular. Eisenhower said it was because of: “Korea, Communism, and Corruption”, while that may be true, or, at least partially true, Truman also desegregated the military which was very unpopular in the Democratic South. While Truman was persona non grata to the general public, scholars regarded him highly and he has always been considered one of the top ten presidents.
In this 2024 poll, Grant is rated the 17th-best president. Interestingly, in the early part of the 20th Century, Grant was in the bottom ten in most presidential polls and was also considered more of a “drunken butcher” than a good general. Now he is generally considered the US’s best general and, with the rise of African American Civil Rights and the South’s phony Lost Cause Theory going out of style, his presidency, especially his Civil Rights record, has been looked at more carefully, and he has been slowly climbing in the polls.
On this poll, BTW, President Joe Biden is ranked 14th and President Donald Trump is dead last. I think that Biden is too old to run for president again and I have been pissed at the way he has dealt with both the Israeli/Palestinian disaster and our Southern border crisis, but there is no question he has been a very active, good- even excellent -president. Our inflation is lower and our economy is doing better than Europe, Canada, and, surprisingly, even Japan and China. He brought a diverse -from AOC and Ilhan Omar to Joe Manchin – Democratic Party together – and passed the $1.9T American Rescue Plan designed to counteract the economic damage caused by COVID which has, more or less, been successful. Biden has also passed a much-needed, $1.0T trillion infrastructure bill known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, and the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 at $53B among other things.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, I don’t think that Trump is our worst president. He probably was our worst-mannered president, even the most erratic and incompetent, but Bush the Younger did the most damage. Under his watch, we killed way over 100,000 in Iraq on a premise he should have known was false. It is worth noting that the people who knew him well, his fellow baseball team owners, wouldn’t even elect him to be Baseball Commissioner.
The name, Presidents Day, implies that we should honor all our presidents equally but that is pretty hard to do, so, if you do have a favorite like I do, it is perfectly alright to just take a moment to honor them. Happy Presidents Day.