President's Day

Lately I've been wishing I could be Doris Kearns Goodwin, noted presidential scholar. But I would like to be Doris Kearns Goodwin without all the years of study. I just want to be an expert on something without all the work, okay?

Naturally, I've been thinking about Doris Kearns Goodwin today, today being President's Day. And of course, I have been thinking about presidents. Perhaps you have seen in the news where there was a new ranking of the best and worst presidents. The survey was done by CSPAN, and here were the results:

The Top 10 Presidents are: Lincoln, Washington, FDR, T. Roosevelt, Truman, JFK, Jefferson, Eisenhower, Wilson, Reagan.

The Bottom 10 Presidents are: Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Pierce, William Henry Harrison, Harding, Millard Fillmore, George W. Bush, Tyler, Hoover and Hayes.

These presidents were judged by noted historians and scholars on leadership characteristics that included public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision/setting an agenda, pursued equal justice for all, performance within context of times.

Well, I think I speak for everyone when I say BORING. Sure, moral authority and administrative skills are important. But are they the MOST important things? I think not. That's why I set about today to establish the best and worst presidents by more interesting criteria.

Since CSPAN used 10 characteristics, I picked 10 also. I went with:
1. Attractiveness: Because, let's admit it, we judge people on their looks.

2. Coolness of Name: Maybe this category was selected to help my man Abraham Lincoln, maybe it wasn't.

3. First Lady: Was she awesome? Or was she lame? I judged this based on looks and by skimming her bio.

4. Quantity of Fun Facts Discerned by Skimming Wikipedia Biography: Like I said, I want to be Doris Kearns Goodwin, but I don't have all day. I need to get in quick and leave with sparking cocktail conversation without doing a lot of heavy lifting.

5. Interesting Experiences Before the White House: Were you a door-to-door salesman? Cause I find that infinitely more interesting than 10 terms as a senator.

6. Scandals: Was this president interesting in a juicy, tabloidy sort of way?

7. End of life/Legacy/Things Named After Him: This was probably the most arbitrary category. If the Wikipedia bio said specifically that a president was well-regarded or poorly regarded, I took that into account. But I also took into account if a president had interesting last words, a fascinating death of story, or an abundance of things named after him.

8. Interesting Pictures on Wikipedia Page: What can I learn just by looking at pictures? Quantity and quality were important here.

9. Would we elect this guy today?: This category took into account how this president might be perceived in today's world. For example, would we elect a guy in a wheelchair? Why do we still crave military men? If the president stumbled into office without an election by means of succession, and then never won an election, he fared poorly in this category.

10. Wikipedia citations: This, to me, was meant to be a measure of how much interest there was in a particular person. It would both measure a level of obsession (i.e., a Wikipedia stalker spending time citing every single sentence on an obscure president) as well as a level of scholarship, as the number of sources would indicate that there were many things worth studying about this person.

Each category was worth 0-10 points, except for Wikipedia citations, in which I took the number of Wikipedia citations and added it to the rest of the score. This quickly proved to be troublesome. First, the obvious reason--modern figures are much more likely to be cited obsessively, cited every day when they do something. Also, I was surprised by how this category damaged Lincoln (only 83 citations) yet aided someone like Benjamin Harrison (112 citations!). George W. Bush is the president with the most Wikipedia citations, with 311, and Barack Obama, who's barely even done anything as president yet, has 215.

So clearly, counting Wikipedia citations is an extremely flawed ways of going about things. It results in a list like this:

Top 10 Best Presidents
1. George W. Bush
2. Ronald Reagan
3. Barack Obama
4. Grover Cleveland
5. Richard Nixon
6. Harry S. Truman
7. Bill Clinton
8. Teddy Roosevelt
9. Calvin Coolidge
10. FDR

Top 10 Worst Presidents
1. Warren G. Harding
2. Martin Van Buren
3. Zachary Taylor
4. James Buchanan
5. Rutherford B. Hayes
6. James Monroe
7. John Quincy Adams
8. Millard Fillmore
9. William McKinley
10. Andrew Johson

Look, I don't have to be Doris Kearns Goodwin to know that these results are serious flawed. So then I re-did the lists, taking out the Wikipedia citations, and these are my official results:

Top 10 Best Presidents:
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. Teddy Roosevelt
3. Ulysses S. Grant
4. JFK
5. Woodrow Wilson
6. Harry S. Truman
7. (3-way tie) George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, FDR
8. Ronald Reagan
9. (tie) James Garfield, Barack Obama
10. (tie) Grover Cleveland, Eisenhower

Top 10 Worst Presidents
1. Warren G. Harding
2. Benjamin Harrison
3. Martin Van Buren
4. Andrew Johnson
5. (tie) John Adams, Calvin Coolidge
6. Zachary Taylor
7. John Quincy Adams
8. James Madison
9. James K. Polk
10. Millard Fillmore

And here are some notes I took during the process that might help explain some of my thought processes:
--Jefferson was a president hindered by not having a cool first lady, but he was immensely helped by the scandal of Sally Hemmings!

--John Quincy Adams did nothing for me, looks-wise. But he had an interesting death story! According to Wikipedia, when the House was debating whether to honor Army officers who served in the Mexican-American War, Adams shouted "NO!!" at the same time that everyone else yelled "AYE" and then he collapsed. His last words are reported to have been, "This is the last of Earth. I am content."

--John Tyler totally got off easy with the way he slipped that second wife into the White House!

--Zachary Taylor may have been poisoned!

--Millard Fillmore's last words were "the nourishment is palatable," after being fed some soup. The adorableness of that was not enough to help him out of the other holes presented by his Wikipedia bio.

--James Buchanan may have been gay! He was def. hurt by not having a first lady, and also, you know, by not stopping the Civil War.

--Tommy Lee Jones should totally play Andrew Johnson in a movie!

--Ulysses S. Grant: attractive, blessed with a cool name, and a good first lady. he wouldn't even let her get surgery to correct her crossed eyes, because he found it too sexy the way it was.

--About the only interesting thing people could say about Benjamin Harrison's wife was that she "was the first First Lady to be born in October."

--McKinley has shockingly few Wikipedia citations, leading me to believe that this could be my niche, should I really try to pursue this Doris Kearns Goodwin thing.

--New favorite First Lady: Florence Harding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Florence_Kling_Harding. There's a new bio coming out next month! But her interesting backstory cannot make up for his other faults, so he kept ending up on the worst lists.

--There are surprisingly few photographs of JFK on his Wikipedia page. For such a handsome president, that really should be addressed.

--I know Barack Obama really hasn't done anything yet. But what can I say? He is good looking, has an interesting name, an awesome First Lady, an intensely enjoyable Wikipedia page, and we'd obviously elect him in this modern age. Those were the categories, after all. Let's hope I am prescient.