OPINION:
For conservatives, it’s maddening to see periodic polls of historians ranking American presidents from the greatest to the worst. These rankings tell us more about the far-left bias of historians than they do about the effectiveness of our presidents.
A recent poll of American history professors rated Barack Obama as one of the greatest American presidents and Donald Trump as one of the worst. Franklin Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson are almost always rated “great” presidents, while Warren Harding and Ulysses S. Grant are rated “failed” presidents.
Roosevelt and Wilson vastly expanded government spending and power, while Harding and Grant cut the size of the government in Washington. Almost comically, the historians rate the bumbling and incompetent Joe Biden higher than Mr. Trump — even though, according to virtually every leading indicator, the economy did substantially better under Mr. Trump.
In order to counter this liberal/progressive view of political leaders, the Committee to Unleash Prosperity polled more than 100 of the most influential conservative thought leaders — a list that includes senators, members of the House of Representatives, governors, think tank scholars, business leaders, and prominent conservative writers and economists.
The question posed was: “Who would you rank as the single most overrated political figure in history, and who would you rank as the single most underrated?”
We received responses from 120 of these top conservative leaders.
Note: This was not a survey of the worst and greatest presidents, but rather, who do they believe the history books rate too highly or poorly.
George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, for example, were selected by only a few as underrated because they are generally highly rated. Mr. Biden received only a few votes for most overrated because most Americans regard him as a poor performer.
For most overrated, the person who was far and away the leading choice was Mr. Obama. Here are the top five in that category:
Most Overrated
1. Barack Obama
2. Franklin Roosevelt
3. Woodrow Wilson
4. John F. Kennedy
5. Joe Biden
For the most underrated category, the winner by a smaller margin was Calvin Coolidge. Here are the top five vote-getters:
Most Underrated
1. Calvin Coolidge
2. Donald Trump
3. Ronald Reagan
4. Dwight Eisenhower
5. Bill Clinton
Coolidge was the president who gave America “the Roaring ’20s,” when the economy and stock market boomed and American living standards soared. He cut tax income tax rates from 75% to 20%. He was in favor of limited government and was famous for saying that “the business of America is business.” Had he run for reelection in 1928 rather than handed over the reins to the hapless Herbert Hoover, the Great Depression would have likely been avoided.
Mr. Clinton is on the underrated list because, despite his personal behavior, the economy prospered in the 1990s, the stock market rocketed forward, we had the only balanced budgets in the last 50 years, and he signed free trade deals, welfare reform, and a capital gains tax cut. He started no wars. We could use a Democrat like that today.
Roosevelt turned what should have been a short-term financial crisis into a decade-long depression by massively increasing government spending through the failed New Deal programs, raising taxes to more than 70%, and keeping the unemployment rate over 10% for nine years.
It is worth mentioning a few presidents who made the conservatives’ list of underrated and overrated. These include Mr. Trump, Kennedy, Jimmy Carter and Lincoln.
Hopefully, in the future, when presidents are ranked, the judges will include successful Americans of all political philosophies and not just left-wing professors who live divorced from reality in their ivory towers.
• Stephen Moore is a co-founder of the Committee to Unleash Prosperity and a senior fellow at The Heritage Foundation.
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