Deciding the best president is a subjective endeavor, as some inhabitants of the Oval Office ranked in the top five are praised for efforts to end slavery, while others enslaved people and were reportedly cruel slave masters.
As political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus from the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn from Coastal Carolina University pointed out in the survey, the partisanship of the political scientists doesn’t change the overall rankings; they do note differences. “While partisanship and ideology don’t tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting.”
A kind of reverse Lincoln effect can be attributed to Trump as some of the positive reception of Biden is because of the president he succeeded. Lincoln, who was sandwiched between Buchanan and Jackson, is who some say is arguably the best president to ever inhabit the Oval Office.
Though Biden is looked upon favorably by historians, in the present moment, polling suggests a lack of confidence in his policy direction and criticism for his age despite Trump being around the same age. Trump also faces disapproval over a largely divisive one-term presidency as well as 91 felony criminal counts, which have not hampered his candidacy for the Republican nomination in the slightest.
The pair explains the ideological divide between the experts, writing, “Republicans and Conservatives rank George Washington as the greatest president.” Democrats placed him either second or third. The authors continued, “There are also several presidents where partisan polarization is evident — Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden — but interestingly not for Bill Clinton.”
Deciding the best president is subjective, as some inhabitants of the Oval Office ranked in the top five are praised for efforts to end slavery. In contrast, others enslaved people and were reportedly cruel slave masters. Harry S. Truman, who ranks just behind Barack Obama at eight, made the call to drop a pair of atomic bombs on Japanese civilians during World War II. Thus, these rankings will not necessarily square with everyone’s experience of the United States of America and the actions of its President, both at home or abroad. According to Rosenhaus and Vaughn, the survey represents a chance for historians and experts to contextualize the opinions of present-day presidents in a broader historical context.
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Source: Black Enterprise
