Pursued Equal Justice for All?  Really?  I mean, we’ve set a pretty low bar historically, but they must be talking in absolute terms, not relative to the standards of the day.  Shrub’s equal justice claims are so far below modern standards as to be criminal.

I love that the only president who scored lower on international relations was William Henry Harrison, who died a month into his term and probably had no appreciable international impact.

Oh, and libdevil, my best guess as to why he’s #24 is that most presidents who embraced slavery are probably worse than Bush in that regard.

Bill Clinton must thank God every day for Dubya making his Presidency look so good in comparison.

Yeah, I noticed Clinton went up by 10 points since 2000.

I don’t agree with Wilson being so high. He was an unrepentant racist (even racist for the standards of the day) and the Treaty of Versailles was a total fail.

Hit ‘em with the Byoo Cannon!

Byoo! Byoo!

LBJ would make a better choice for his spot though. Probably too many Vietnam-era historians on the panel.

I agree, and its the same reason Kennedy is rated so highly. Sure he could have been a great President, but he wasn’t in office long enough to make a huge difference. It’s pure baby boomer nostalgia to rank him #6. Most of his best ideas were actually passed by Johnson.

LBJ will probably never make the top ten as long as we really remember Vietnam—it undoes a lot of the good that the Great Society programs did. It’s hard for me to feel anything but ambivalent about him.

I still think that Bush ought to be lower on that list, though. Harrison wasn’t in office long enough to do any active damage, so I’d say he ought to be higher than Bush. And Andrew Johnson was pretty much made irrelevant not too long into his tenure, so he didn’t do the same kind of damage Bush did. I mean, when I’m weighing worst ever, I think that actively bad ought to be worse than ineffective.

International Relations - Bush is #41 out of 42.

The only guy who scored worse was the president who was only in office for 33 days because he got pneumonia at his own inauguration and died a month later.  A president who served more than 150 years ago, when there were no telephones.  A president who would have accomplished literally nothing on foreign relations in such a short period of time in the mid 1800s.

BTW… before anybody asks the inevitable “Why are there only 42 listed when Dubya was #43?” question…

Grover Cleveland was one person with two different presidencies - 22nd and 24th (he served two non-consecutive terms).

The non-Lincoln Civil War-era Presidents will always be at the bottom because they failed to confront the moral question of their time—they either passed the buck or did what the slave power told them to. I don’t think any President can ever do worse than that.

I disagree with JFK ranking higher than Thomas Jefferson.

There, I said it.

I disagree with JFK ranking higher than Thomas Jefferson.

There, I said it.

I agree, the Louisiana purchase alone should get Jefferson up a few notches.

And Andrew Johnson was pretty much made irrelevant not too long into his tenure, so he didn’t do the same kind of damage Bush did.

Not sure about that.

Andrew Johnson single-handedly fucked up Reconstruction beyond all recognition, and in the process he may have set race relations back 100 years, which is why we were still seeing African-Americans getting beaten down in the streets by police with water hoses in the South 100 years after his presidency.

A. Johnson & Buchanan are probably the only two presidents who may always remain lower than Bush in these ratings systems - but wherever they are placed in relation to each other, I think those three are hands down the worst we’ve ever had.

Ironically enough, the two worst presidents of all time on this list are the men who came directly before and after the greatest president of all time.

I’m wondering how long it is until some GOP lackey comes by to point out the fact that 2 of the top 4 presidents of all time are Republicans, completely ignoring the historical evolution of the parties (Republicans were the more progressive party from 1860 to the early 1900s)...

And the fact that T. Roosevelt’s enemies accused him of being a “socialist”. Some things never change!

A heckuva job.

Byoo Cannon??!  Fah!

Use the Air Farce Chicken Cannon!

I love that the only president who scored lower on international relations was William Henry Harrison, who died a month into his term and probably had no appreciable international impact.

Unfair to the memory of Harrison, IMO, since he never pre-emptively invaded a sovereign nation based on false pretenses.

I also love that the other president directly related to Bush (Franklin Pierce) is lower than him. That is one fucked up family.

I also love that the other president directly related to Bush (Franklin Pierce)

Well, George H.W. is on there, too. He moved up—probably because his failure of a son makes him look good by comparison. They’re probably thinking “well, he was smart enough not to try to occupy Iraq”.

Unfortunately, that argument will never die, because one of the lesser-known traits of the right-wing authoritarian mindset is the iron-clad belief in the immutability of characteristics.

True enough.  The reality is, there would be no place for Abe Lincoln or Teddy Roosevelt in today’s Republican Party.  Hell, even Ike would probably be considered a socialist in the modern day GOP, what with his massive Interstate highway program built using Pentagon money.

Ike created the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, undertook huge spending on infrastructure, and sent federal troops to Little Rock during integration. He also refused to cut taxes unless the budget was balanced.

Yeah, he’d sure as hell be unwelcome in today’s GOP. I’m not even sure Dick Nixon would be right wing enough to win a GOP Presidential Primary today.

I’m with you on Reagan—unfortunately, he seems to get credit for the end of the Cold War, which may have ended on his watch, but was largely the work of those who preceeded him by decades.

And the Soviets blowing their budget on a war in Afghanistan.

The Soviet Union was just plain doomed from the beginning by a crappy economic model.

And don’t forget Warren G. Harding, who is only ranked lower because he died after little more than half a term.

Couple of kind words about Andrew Johnson.  He was pretty much hamstrung by Congress who wanted only to punish the South.  They even tried to impeach him because he was “insufficiently vigorous.” 

Even poor Mr. Harding and Gen. Grant; I don’t think they personally profited from the scandals. 

No, I’d put Dubya at #41.  Buchanan should rot in a deeper ring of hell than is reserved for Dubya.

At least Dubya beat Hoover in economic management.

How the hell does Reagan always end up on the top of these things?  The guy was a senile, racist, sexist, classist, communist-paranoid ass.

But he was an actor and everyone loves celebrities!

GHW Bush wasn’t that bad of a president. He, at least, cleanly won his war (if you ignore all the dead Shi’ites), and managed the end of the Cold War with reasonable competence. Also, when the budget situation called for raising taxes, he raised taxes.

He should outrank Reagan, at least.

And I agree that JFK is *way* overrated.

I’m glad to see Grant out of the bottom cohort; Grant was, until LBJ, the best president we’ve had with regards to race relations. If he had been president immediately after Lincoln we would have been a lot better off.

I would rank Bush II above only Pierce, Buchanan, and A. Johnson.

Unfair to the memory of Harrison, IMO, since he never pre-emptively invaded a sovereign nation based on false pretenses.

Depends on how you feel about the sovereignty of the Native American tribes.  OK, that was before he was president…

I also think Kennedy is ridiculously high.  But there are SO MANY bad ones that you don’t really have to be that good to become one of the best.

Isn’t Andrew Jackson usually higher on these kinds of lists, BTW?  And John Adams hasn’t gotten a bounce from the McCullough treatment that made such a difference for Truman.

Isn’t Andrew Jackson usually higher on these kinds of lists, BTW?

Not since people started caring about the government-sanctioned genocide he perpetrated. I wish the state parties would change the names of their annual party dinners from Jefferson-Jackson to Jefferson-Roosevelt Day.

The two Presidents who signed Sedition Acts belong below all the Presidents who didn’t, quite apart from any other facts about them.

@ Ben D.:  True enough, but racism and ruthless warfare aren’t exactly disqualifications from the upper echelons of American presidents, even in this very list.  I’m not trying to defend Jackson, mind you, just noting a shift over time.  Jackson comes in at 13, same as the last survey. 

I don’t know what McKinley is doing at 16.  That guy has a lot to answer for.

In the context of the early 20th Century, TR wasn’t that much of a racist. What he did in the Phillipines wasn’t any different from what the British were doing in India or the French in Indochina and Africa at the time.

Racism by the standards of TODAY isn’t a disqualification IMHO, but the President’s policies were more racist than the times, it should. Wilson’s actions and statements were controversial even for the early 20th Century, Jackson’s Indian removal was hotly contested as well. TR’s racial views were about standard, maybe even a notch better than the standard of the day.