We have to get our hands dirty for the exercise to mean anything. We also like to focus on a president’s effectiveness (in achieving his goals, no matter what those goals are), because it allows us the illusion of neutrality, and to abstain from judgment and keep our politics private but we can’t be apolitical in evaluating politicians. Human beings are suckers for charisma we feel the pull of magnetically persuasive leaders like FDR, JFK, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama (charismatics are usually Democrats, for whatever reason).
These are lousy criteria to judge our chief executives, and yet most everyone uses them, consciously or not. Seriously: On the basis of charisma, effectiveness, and activism, some of the worst leaders in history would have to be pronounced great, not least Adolf Hitler.
(James Polk and Lyndon Johnson were the two most effective presidents in history they were also bad ones.) That he intervened militarily abroad, economically at home, and meddled in worldly affairs are just as likely bad signs as good ones, and usually more bad it’s precisely when presidents “do too much”, instead of showing executive restraint, that America (and other nations) end up suffering for it. That he accomplished his goals says nothing about how good those goals were. I’ve said this many times before: Just because a leader is charismatic and can move you with speeches, doesn’t say anything about his policies and how good he was for the American people. Call these biases the (a) charisma bias, the (b) effectiveness bias, and the (c-d-e) activist biases. Mainstream historians tend to favor presidents who were (a) charismatics, (b) goal-oriented “managers”, (c) foreign interventionists, (d) big-government statists, and (e) globalists. Spencer’s book is now a second helpful remedy to the established mainstream views of which presidents were good and bad and somewhere in-between. Of the countless president rankings flooding the market, there has been only one that I find useful: Recarving Rushmore by Ivan Eland. presidents is outside his usual area, but he does a very good job where most others fail.
The author, Robert Spencer, wrote the magisterial History of Jihad and many other books on Islam. There’s a new book coming out, and it’s quite a treat: Rating America’s Presidents.
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