In February and March 2005, the Federalist Society and The Wall Street Journal asked an ideologically balanced group of 130 prominent professors of history, law, political science and economics to rate the presidents on a 5-point scale, with 5 meaning highly superior and 1 meaning well below average. Eighty-five scholars responded, and the presidents are ranked in order of mean score, adjusted to give equal weight to Democratic- and Republican-leaning respondents.
— OpinionJournal – Extra, which has the chart.
“GOP-leaning scholars rated Mr. Bush the 6th-best president of all time, while Democratic ones rated him No. 35, or 6th-worst,” says James Taranto.
Caveat lector: The Federalist Society is a self-described “group of conservatives and libertarians.” The Wall Street Journal is editorially much the same. That may or may not have prejudiced this study. You decide.
Be interesting to see the same group express opinions about Dubya in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
I was just going to say the same thing. I suspect that, also, Clinton will rise, and Reagan will drop, along with W. Clinton presided over a long economic boom with relatively successful foreign policies and few American casualties.
But largely, any future rankings (say 20 years out) will be as much a referendum on Reagan’s economic policies, more than enthusiastically being carried out by W. If we’re a debtor nation in significant decline, you can bet the architects of those policies will drop, regardless of our current political issues today. If we recover from them, they’ll be where they are now, more or less. We’re still waiting for the other shoe to drop on the economy (housing bubble, federal deficit, trade deficit), so the jury’s still out.