There is one presidential ranking that is not debatable
HBO host John Oliver offers Clarence Thomas $1 million a year to retire
It's like asking which baseball player is the greatest of all time.
It's a parlor game where sorting through the different eras of the game over beers can get pretty complicated and statistics are only a sliver of the argument. And god forbid if one of the participants is a Yankee fan.
Ranking presidents may be the intellectual equivalent - especially during an election year - with historians, political scientists and authors chugging wine over who was the greatest president. It's a parlor game for Ph.Ds where presidents get bonus points for keeping the country out of war.
There is nothing like debating whether Adams and his son were more effective than Harrison and his grandson, and I'm pretty sure a big chunk of you are scratching your head over who the heck the Harrisons are.
The amateurs among us are content with the Lincoln vs. Washington debate, but it gets pretty murky after you've gone through the heads on Mount Rushmore.
Modern researchers have taken the game more seriously, asking hundreds of egghead experts to score presidents like Olympic gymnasts, and in a nod to the times try to factor in any possible political bias.
What used to be a fun academic pursuit is now a political football.
This past fall, Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University conducted an online survey to rank all 45 United States presidents and I'm wondering when the last time a college professor at Coastal Carolina made national news.
While the politically astute among us believe we could also give a credible ranking, the reality is most of us could not even name all 45 presidents and even fewer who could provide the pros and cons of the presidencies of Rutherford B. Hayes or John Tyler.
Thankfully - I think - there are experts among us.
Rottinghaus and Vaughn invited 525 people to participate in their rankings. They included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association.
I'd shorten it to "History Nerds Incorporated."
If you haven't heard of the American Political Science Association, it is the leading professional organization for the study of political science and serves more than 11,000 members, but as far as I know none have ever become president. The nerds also included scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses. In other words, the books that end up in the bargain bin.
Of the 525 who were asked to participate, there were 154 responses, which begs the question: What could all these tenured professors possibly be doing that was more interesting than comparing the presidencies of Zachary Taylor and Franklin Pierce.
The subhead was that rankings were still mostly the same as the last survey in 2018 with Abraham Lincoln topping the list.
The "Breaking News" - especially on liberal cable network shows - was the rankings for the worst president.
It was Donald Trump.
By a lot.
The respondents were asked to rate the presidents for their "overall greatness" on a scale from 0 to 100. Total failure was 0. Average was 50. Great was 100.
Trump's average score was 10.92 above failure to put him 45th and nearly six points behind James Buchanan, the guy historians blame for doing nothing to stop slavery and prevent the Civil War.
Trump also ran away with the title for "most polarizing president" with 170 mentions. Andrew Jackson was second with 74 mentions while Barack Obama was third.
Naturally, there will be talk of bias and conspiracy around these rankings, but at least it didn't come with an indictment.
Republicans and Trump supporters will say the college professors and academics behind the rankings tend to be more liberal in their beliefs, but the researchers took that into consideration and broke down the rankings by political affiliation as well.
Trump did not fare much better.
Republican nerds ranked him 41st and Conservatives 43rd. Democrats, moderates and independents all ranked him 45th.
So I'm going to cut Trump some slack and for the sake of argument acknowledge that William Henry Harrison, Franklin Pierce and Andrew Johnson were all worse presidents than Trump, even though I'm relatively clueless about the administrations of Harrison and Pierce.
What is interesting about these surveys is how the historical record continues to evolve.
Ulysses S. Grant left the presidency in 1877 amidst scandal, yet recent scrutiny of his presidency has seen him leap nine slots since 2013 to 17th.
Harry Truman left the presidency with just a 32 percent approval rating, but he is now ranked sixth in the latest rankings.
George W. Bush, who many considered a bad president because of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, was ranked 35th in 2013, but has since risen three slots to 32nd. He is now ahead of Richard Nixon, who is ranked 35th.
What will make Republicans crazy is the ranking of Barack Obama. Obama was ranked 16th in 2013, but has since moved up nine slots to seventh. Bill Clinton is ranked 12th.
And despite all the recent criticism about President Joe Biden's age and his handling of the economy, the experts ranked him 14th.
But the two researchers behind the survey - Vaughn and Rottinghaus - wrote an explanation for that in the Los Angeles Times: "Biden's most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump (and resumed a more traditional style of presidential leader."
But can he do it again?
Don't miss John Oliver
I know your cable bill is already too high.
I know the number of streaming services you have continue to multiply, but you need to have Max (It used to be HBO) to watch John Oliver.
Oliver's weekly talk show - he is an alum of Jon Stewart's Daily Show - wins the Emmy year after year for best talk show for his cutting age political satire that angers, informs and leaves you busting a gut with laughter.
Oliver's Last Week Tonight show has been off until this past week when he not only addressed Thomas' lack of ethics, he came up with a solution.
He pulled out a contract and offered Thomas $1 million a year for life if we would resign from the Supreme Court. As a bonus, Oliver took the television camera backstage to show he was also offering the Supreme Court justice a motor coach worth $2.4 million.
Incredulously, Oliver said he was shocked to learn that none of this was illegal, then addressed Thomas directly:
"I think you’re thinking, what would my friend say if I take this offer? Will they judge me as they sit in their boardrooms and mega yachts and Hitler shrines? Will they still treat me to luxury vacations and sing songs about me off their phones?” Oliver said. “Well, that’s the beauty of friendship, Clarence. If they’re real friends, they’ll love you no matter what your job is. So I guess this might be the perfect way to find out who your real friends actually are.”
So far Thomas has not responded.
Rockwell Falls to open
It was great to hear that the Rockwell Falls Public Library in Lake Luzerne plans on opening on March 1 after being closed since September when its entire staff quit because it felt unsafe.
You read that right. They felt unsafe in a rural library.
The new board of trustees has moved quickly to hire Marian Allan as the library manager to oversee the facility and hire more staff.
Best 5-second video
Emily Russell, a reporter for North Country Public Radio, posted this short video on X this week with the words "Life really is better in the Adirondacks."
See for yourself.
Correction
Last week, I mentioned that the boys basketball tournament had expanded to five size classes. My former colleague Greg Brownell reminded me that it is actually six classes.
Glens Falls begins post season play on Saturday at Siena College where it will play Ichabod Crane at 2:30 p.m.
Journalism retirement
If you're interested to read more about the journey of a couple of retired journalists - Will Doolittle and me - then you might want to check out the essay on the First Amendment Center website at Middle Tennessee State University.
Aside from his attempt at insurrection Trump was a squarely bad president but not the worst. His most awful tendencies were often muted by his cabinet and advisors and by the moderating influence of Democrats in Congress. But his attempt at insurrection puts him in a category alone.
GWB would be my vote for the worst non-traitor president. He was installed as president by the thinnest of margins and a specious ruling by SCOTUS then rather than attempt to unite a divided nation he declared he had a mandate and proceeded to push hard a far right agenda. His administration’s focus on re-making America blinded him to warnings of potential terrorism and he presided over 9/11. Rather than taking the course of treating 9/11 as an international crime and rallying the world in support of justice, an inclusive gesture, he and his leftover Vietnam era advisors determined a course of war to prove America’s military might. The Taliban had nothing to do with 9/11. We had no beef with them. We just wanted bin Laden. GWB spent little effort to negotiate a handover.
Consider for a moment how history would have been different if Bush had given 6 months for a worldwide effort to bring bin Laden to justice through negotiation. Would negotiation have been successful? Perhaps not, but in that time a much more sophisticated plan could have been devised at a highly targeted mission to capture him.
But wait! There’s more! GWB lied to the world to start the Iraq 2 war. He signed documents the “legalized” torture, black sites, Guantanamo Bay… He is unquestionably a war criminal for authorizing all of that. It’s not even a close call. It is not a question of doing necessary bad things for the greater good of the nation. None of it was necessary. And it further divided us.
GWB ignored the many millions who took to the streets in protest of the Iraq War. He called them “focus groups,” and herded them into “free speech zones.”
He was an anti-Lincoln.
All of that set up for a Trump to come along. So when Trump signed an agreement, essentially a surrender to the Taliban, a group we consider terrorists, Americans were so weary of war that we hardly noticed that the USA surrendered to terrorists without even bringing the actual Afghan government into the talks.
My vote is for GWB as worst president ever.
Trump belongs on a list by himself. He should not, and cannot legally be president again - not because of the 14th Amendment, but straight up due to his violation of his oath of office.
My vote for the worst SCOTUS would be the Roberts Court.
EDIT: does everyone understand that the United States of America under Trump negotiated a surrender to the Taliban who were not even a nation state at the time? Because we should all know that. We surrendered in Afghanistan. That was not Joe Biden.
More people should get their news from Last Week Tonight. John Oliver never disappoints.