Although we can never be 100% objective, I have an idea to help us determine with as little ideological and partisan bias as possible who the best and worst Presidents have been.
Name a quality that someone in the office needs to have, something where it wouldn’t be too hard to judge and rank a few guys against each other. The quality should be free of ideological bias to the extent possible, so “supports the 2a” is not a “quality” and neither are judicial appointments. Something like “appoints good people to cabinet posts” IS a very real quality, but nearly impossible to come to agreement on, because you run into the same partisan biases as with the President himself. I happen to think Dick Cheney was a much better DefSec than Rumsfeld or Harold Brown, but your mileage may vary.
So here are some qualities I’m thinking of:
Bringing dignity to the office. Some Presidents have been respected and brought respect to the office, even while not being too successful. Others have been running jokes, despite being successful in other ways.
Skill at military management. Some Presidents seemed to do everything right when it came to authorizing military missions, others tended to fail, often due to not being able to find the right balance between Presidential leadership and micromanagement.
Skill at summits. Some Presidents had major foreign policy accomplishments and were good negotiators with foreign leaders. Others, either couldn’t even secure summits or accomplished little or nothing when they actually tried.
Skill at Congressional negotiations. Some Presidents, notably LBJ, were legendary at getting their way with Congress. Others, like Carter, couldn’t even get their own party to go along with most of their agenda.
Scandal. While there are often disagreements about what constitutes a scandal and how serious it is, I think there’s a pretty clear hierarchy among Presidents from “constantly scandalous” to “almost clean”. I’d say that hierarchy has Nixon at the “constantly scandalous” bottom and Barack Obama at the “almost clean” level.
So disagree with my criteria, include your own, and once we’ve got like ten or so attributes we all agree are something all Presidents should have regardless of party, we’ll start ranking Presidents(mainly the ones we remember, so post war or maybe start with Kennedy), and maybe show those biased historians how it’s done.
What are the job requirements? There are 4 ways Presidents spend their time.
Ceremonial aspects.
Public diplomacy: persuasiveness.
Coalition management. Locating legislative majorities, buttering up allies.
Analytic ability for decision making. Has been outsourced to varying extents. Time pressures limit this for Presidents with high cognitive function.
Campaigns test the first 2 (as well as physical stamina). The last 2 aren’t emphasized enough in my view.
There is also personnel management, the ability to attract good people, keep good people, and get them approved by Congress when necessary.
That one is good for objectively comparing records but their effect on the economy is limited so it can be hard to figure that one out. Plus the delay factor, obviously a President isn’t responsible for what he inherited.
IMHO, the most consideration when rating Presidents should go to their most significant and lasting accomplishments and ‘anti-commplishments’, to coin a word.
The problem is, that’s not exactly fertile territory for objective evaluation. You can objectively measure how big and lasting the effect of a program was, but whether it was an accomplishment of a positive or negative sort is emphatically subjective. For instance, there are those who still argue that Bush’s invasion of Iraq was a positive accomplishment.
First of all, if you wish to be truly objective, you cannot use “ratings”, because ratings are not “objective.” They are subjective opinions of how a President did with regard to certain qualifications. That’s very politically oriented, of course; there are many who, to this day, in the South, would argue that what Lincoln did about the attempt of the various states to secede should be rated poorly.
No one was more disrespected than Lincoln (mass killing is a lot more disrespectful than jokes!), but I subjectively think he did an excellent job under hideous circumstances.
If the Middle East becomes all democratic in 20 years or so, some might point to the invasion of Iraq as the catalyst. Which would be a case of getting the Big Idea right but messing up the execution.
There are some attributes where I think you can use ratings. For example, rating the best speakers, I bet we’d come up with pretty similar rankings regardless of partisanship.
Not being bigoted, with consideration taken for the time period the president in question served. Someone like Woodrow Wilson, for example, would get especially bad marks, while someone like Lincoln could be agreed to be more a product of his times.
As a pretty smart guy, I’d figure you as somebody who understood the meaning of “objective”. Rankings for things like speaking ability is, as already noted, entirely subjective. Objective rankings are things like “number of jobs created”, “number of administration officials indicted”, “average change in GDP per year”.
I think I was going for, “Let’s objectively come up with attributes that we can then subjectively rate.”, which is better than what most people do, which is have their favorites and then just figure out reasons why they are awesome.
I think that the Presidency is like a relay race; you take the baton from the person who came before you, and you hand it off to the next in line. Your job is to improve your position while you are in charge. (The quintessential, “Are you better off than you were 4 years ago?”)
So, maybe come up with a list of qualities that reflect that:
Expansion of the territory
Improvement of the economy
Reduction or resolution of domestic & international conflicts
No, or few, wasteful misadventures (within which I would include scandals, which cost the country millions of dollars and hours of productivity to unravel the person’s bad deeds)
I don’t think that things like “speaking ability”, “bills passed”, or a more general “popularity” should be included; they reflect how presidents usually accomplish their deeds, but a President who improved the economy, didn’t waste time or money, and resolved or minimized conflicts was a good president regardless of whether he was polished or suave, and passing bad legislation is worse than passing no legislation.
