I’m sending this poll to IMHO.
- Abraham Lincoln (Republican, 1861-1865) Hardest job of any president
- George Washington (None, 1789-1797) The one indispensible revolutionary
- Franklin Roosevelt (Democrat, 1933-1945) Beat Nazis and Depression
- Thomas Jefferson (Democratic-Republican, 1801-1809) Father of westward expansion
- Lyndon Johnson (Democrat, 1963-1969) Would be higher without Vietnam
- Woodrow Wilson (Democrat, 1913-1917) Years ahead of his time
- John F. Kennedy (Democrat, 1961-1963) Space + missile crisis - Bay of Pigs
- Bill Clinton (Democrat, 1993-2001) Peace, prosperity, surplus
- Dwight Eisenhower (Republican, 1953-1961) Father of interstates
- Theodore Roosevelt (Republican, 1901-1909) Father of national parks
- James Monroe (Democrat-Republican, 1817-1825) Era of Good Feeling was largely luck
- James Carter (Democrat, 1977-1981) Stood for human rights, unfairly blamed for oil price spike, hostages
- Grover Cleveland (Democrat, 1885-1889, 1893-1897) Reformed spoils system and created ICC
- Harry Truman (Democrat, 1945-1953) Overrated, competent presidency but did not need to use a-bomb
- John Adams (Federalist, 1797-1801) Most underrated of the revolutionaries, but did sign Alien and Sedition Act
- William Howard Taft (Republican, 1909-1913) One of the underrated 20th century presidents, only one to serve in all three branches of government at the highest level.
- Rutherford B. Hayes (Republican, 1877-1881) Remarkably progressive for his time in civil rights and women’s rights
- George H.W. Bush (Republican, 1989-1993) Handled Gulf War masterfully, but should not have reproduced
- Gerald Ford (Republican, 1977-1981) Was what nation needed after Nixon, but mostly did no harm
- James K. Polk (Democrat, 1845-1849) Did what he said he would and got out
- James Madison (Democrat-Republican, 1809-1817) Thanks for the Constitution, but no thanks for the War of 1812.
- John Quincy Adams (Democratic-Republican. 1825-1829) Man of principles, but not effective president.
- William McKinley (Republican, 1897-1901) Prosperity but war with Spain
- Benjamin Harrison (Republican, 1889-1893) Pensions to Civil War vets, Sherman anti-trust act
- James Garfield (Republican, 1881) Meant well but too short to tell what could have been
- William Henry Harrison (Whig, 1841) At least he did neither good nor harm
- Zachary Taylor (Whig, 1849-1850) Another short timer of little impact
- Millard Filmore (Whig, 1850-1853) His signing of Fugitive Slave Act killed his party
- John Tyler (Democrat, 1841-1845) Finishing term of predecessor of other party was too much for him.
- Calvin Coolidge (Republican, 1923-1929) Laissez-faire incarnate
- Chester A. Arthur (Republican, 1881-1885) Reformed civil service, lowered tariffs to reduce embarrassing surpluses
- Ulysses Grant (Republican, 1869-1877) Great general, ineffective president
- Franklin Pierce (Democrat, 1853-1857) In way over his head, signed Kansas-Nebraska Act
- Martin Van Buren (Democrat, 1837-1841) Panic of 1837
- Andrew Jackson (Democrat, 1829-1837) Killed national bank, persecuted native Americans
- Warren Harding (Republican, 1921-1923) Corrupt friends and scandal
- Andrew Johnson (National Union, 1865-1869) Vetoed Civil Rights bill
- Herbert Hoover (Republican, 1929-1933) The man of inaction in times of crisis
- Richard Nixon (Republican, 1969-1974) Too liberal for today’s GOP, he had one fatal flaw of character
- James Buchanan (Democrat, 1857-1861) Ultimate man of inaction, made Coolidge look hyperkinetic
- Ronald Reagan (Republican, 1981-1989) King of irresponsible tax cuts and gutting of regulation. His motto was there was indeed a free lunch and we’re going to eat it.
- George W Bush (Republican, 2001-2009) The decider who always made the wrong decision. We’ve had dumb presidents, but none dumber. We’ve had corrupt presidents, but none more corrupt. We’ve had bad wars but none started for worse reasons.
This is why I believe Clinton and especially Bush Jr. is too early to rate as it provokes extreme emotional responses.
Still you think he’s higher then Truman who managed to defend Eastern Europe and Asia against Communism?
He was also severely racist and refused to compromise on the League of Nations just because it was proposed by an enemy of his.
Did not intervene in Rwanda and try to stop the genocide there. Cowardly withdrew from Somalia (Reagan also from Lebanon). Ignored the warning signs of Al-Qaeda despite numerous terrorist attacks and didn’t kill Bin Laden when we ought to have.
Much more: helped establish the Clean Food and Drug Act, fought for the working class should be much higher on your list certainly above Clinton and Wilson.
Agreed, he didn’t do much really so he should be lower.
I do think he should be lower then Truman or McKinley.
Did you give Truman a low rating because he dropped the A-Bombs?
Even for a Democrat Jeb Bush is a pretty good guy.
Definately should be higher. He gave us Pacific territory and made the US a two ocean power.
Wrote the Constitution before he was President so unless you give say Jackson credit for the Battle of New Orleans shouldn’t apply.
And we got Puerto Rico, Guam, and other strategic territories.
Shouldn’t be rated because of that reason.
Fought for the rights of blacks and attempted to quash the KKK.
It’s absurd to rank Nixon so low just because of Watergate. Plenty of Presidents commited far more evil actions yet they weren’t caught. Kennedy for instance commited voter fraud and had Mafia connections. Also Nixon opened up China, tried to save South Vietnam, and continued and expanded programs that were in the nature of Johnson’s programs.
Should be at least ranked higher then Buchanan who let the nation be torn apart. Did Reagan do that? I agree he was too lassiz-fare on economics but he had an even-handed foreign policy which won us the Cold War.
Should be ranked higher then Buchanan. Did Bush cause a Civil War? Did he make the wrong decision on every issue, even immigration when the nativist wing of his party called for deporting all the illegals, even when he tried to stop Israel from bombing Iran? Idiocy is relative. Corruption? Was Bush more corrupt then Grant, Kennedy, Harding, Buchanan? I find it hard to believe so. Bad wars? even worse then War of 1812 which was a war of national suicide? In conclusion you partisan attack Nixon, Reagan, and Bush II is an unfortuante result of the extreme partisanship in ranking the Presidents.
I cut Buchanan a little slack in that I don’t think there’s much he could have done to prevent the Civil War. Bush, on the other hand, avoided peaceful solutions whenever possible.
I rate LBJ high because of the Civil Rights Act.
To say Reagan won the Cold War is just revisionist history.
What about his attempts at a two state solution for Israel and Palestine? And what about the other critcisms applied to him?
Agreed
Still your opinion of Reagan seems to be unusually harsh.
Too funny. Your list is interesting only in so far as it says more about you and how blindly partisan you are than anything interesting about the actual presidents. Hell, you rated Carter as number 12…nuff said right there. Even leaving aside the fact that you rated Reagan the next to the worst. 
And Woodrow Wilson (and Lyndon Johnson, along with Bill Clinton!) in the top 10?? Gods.
And rating him 41st is, well, really silly. I’d have to say that it’s MORE silly than those who say he single handedly won the Cold War, in fact.
-XT
As would be acting like he had nothing to do with it at all. Reagan talked tough and acted tough on the Soviets, but he also took many opportunities to negotiate and meet with Gorbachev, winding up with the INF Treaty.
I agree with this. For my money, Reagan did some very good things and some very bad things, and deserves to be ranked somewhere in the middle.
I would absolutely rank Bush II last among modern Presidents, but there were several in the 19th century who were worse based merely on what we know rather than what we suspect.
I still think Washington gets too much credit for his presidency. I asked earlier in the thread what he actually did as President, and Shagnasty was the only one who had anything to offer- he set a template and stepped down gracefully. Those qualities don’t make him a top ten president, for my money. Was he the greatest man who served as US President? Almost certainly. Was he the greatest President? Equally certainly not.
By the same token, Carter was a poor President, but a good man. BLD noted that he was unfairly blamed for the oil crisis, which is true, but immaterial. Presidents are scored on how well they handle crises, not on whether or not crises occur, and Carter did not handle them particularly well.
Clinton didn’t have to handle any crises at all, really, other than one which he brought upon himself, and while he may have presided over a strong economy, it would be a stretch to say he had much of a hand in it (as it was a stretch to credit Reagan for his boom years).
I’d bump Wilson back to the middle, too. His racist social policies ruin the marvelous foreign policy legacy.
I stick up for Carter for the Camp David agreements and for the Panama Canal Treaty. The Panama Canal treaty was unpopular, but it was the right thing to do.
I’ll give you that Grant was a racial progressive for his time, but all in all his administration was ineffective. The whole Johnson to McKinley era was dominated by some extremely forgettable presidents.
I stick by my ranking of Reagan. The party of NO has its roots in Reagan, the notions that any tax increase makes Baby Jesus cry and that all government regulations are the spawn of Satan are the results of the Reagan Revolution. He was a great communicator and an effective president, but effective in a negative sense. I predict that in 20 years, his stock will go down dramatically just as Carter’s will go up.
Keeping a campaign promise? Another thing rarely seen among politicians.
What attempts?
And some very powerful but also forgotten Speakers.
Left unspoken was the fact that he planned to have himself named President for life and thus never have to run for a second term. 
In what country?
Well I assume you are calling the violence in Iraq a “civil war”. Well Bush through mismanagement of Iraq did contribute to this but he also stopped it with the Surge Strategy.
Jimmy Carter: He is generally given too much flak by the right, but his tacit support for Robert Mugabe and his poor energy policy should give him some big black marks. Using tax incentives to encourage alternative energy use only resulted in alt-energy companies requiring a larger profitable company to invest in them for the tax breaks and resulted in some companies rising only to fall when the tax incentives were revoked. It would have been better to give them straight up grants.
His appointment of Paul Volcker was probably the major thing that led to the prosperity of the early Reagan years, though Reagan’s policies of deregulation led to the collapse in the late 80s which he should’ve taken the blame for. He also spitefully removed the solar panels from the roof of the white house and destroyed all the work that Carter did on alternative energy.
Without Bill Casey in the CIA Afghanistan might not have gone the way it did so Reagan certainly deserves some credit for winning the cold war, but not the credit he is given.
Ultimately I’d rate Carter higher than Reagan but I’d probably put them side by side somewhere around the middle.
Meh. I don’t think anybody really knew how crazy Mugabe was, and it never would have happened had Ian Smith and the white government not created the atmosphere in which radical movements of any political ideology were bound to thrive.
Speaking as an outsider, I’d go:
- Abraham Lincoln
- George Washington
- FDR
- Thomas Jefferson
- Theodore Roosevelt
I give props to those who preserved the country’s existence, which covers 1-4, and credit Teddy for just being supremely awesome. Teddy Roosevelt might actually have been the most awesome head of state since Alexander the Great. Teddy Roosevelt was like if you combined Chuck Norris and Carl Sagan and Sam Elliott and made a President out of them.
The bottom group would consist of the folks you’d expect. I agree with Curtis on Madison, who damn near destroyed his country out of sheer stupidity.
Where I’d differ from the consensus is LBJ and Nixon. This will sound nutty, but in my humble opinion Nixon was the greater President of the two. I think Curtis ranked Nixon about right, and LBJ ten to fifteen spots too high, at least. Nixon’s abuse of power and disgrace were bad, no doubt, but worse than the Vietnam War? Vietnam was largely LBJ’s doing; he was the one who oversaw its escalation into a bloody quagmire. If you’re going to ding Bush 2.0 for Iraq you have to ding LBJ at least twenty times as much for Vietnam, because that’s how many people it killed. The United States killed more people, and lost more of its own children, in a bad four months in Vietnam than it did in the whole time it’s been in Iraq.
Nixon did accomplish a lot of critical things, and I’ll even go one step further; I’d argue Nixon did more to win the Cold War than did Ronald Reagan. It was Nixon who got China onside, and that was a huge, huge coup; a world post-1973 in which China is an ally, or even just vaguely onside with, the Soviet Union might not have been nearly as fortunate a world for the West as it was. It was Nixon who started down the road of real arms talks and reductions. He had more warts than a bucket of toads, but he accomplished some very, very big things, things arguably every bit as important as (and perhaps less inevitable than) the Civil Rights Act, and he was less responsible for the bloodbath in Vietnam than Johnson.
Nixon sabotaged the Vietnam peace process to get elected as the peace candidate in 1968. That’s worse than Johnson escalating it in the first place, IMO. Also, from what I’ve read, the War of 1812 did not almost destroy the US. Burning the White House doesn’t qualify.
That’s because we got lucky. The British was several times larger then our military potential and had there been a few mistakes, defeats then New England could have seceded from the United States or even if not so the US could have lost large amounts of territory. Read this for a taste of a horrible world : http://decadesofdarkness.alternatehistory.com
You don’t seem to have a President between 1917 and 1921.
I think you should have Wilson from 1913 to 1921.