btw, since both of us are political scientists... we must be qualified to be trump's chief science adviser...
I agree with your premise it is to early to judge Obama. But it's never to early to judge Trump. Here is why. Imagine if a child who hasn't developed object permanence yet and lacks so little self-awareness that they say "I'm like a really smart person" in a non-sarcastic manner became our commander and chief? At that in you would never give him a chance and assume he is the least EQUIPPED President ever. I think a more accurate term for Trump would not be "worst president ever" but "least EQUIPPED and qualified president ever".
I would point out that if you look at their report, the last table shows grades historians have given Trump on main drivers. The drivers are: Legislative Accomplishments, Foreign Policy Leadership, Embodying Institutional Norms, and Communicating with the Public. Even disaggregating historians by political persuasion, they don't give Trump better than a C on anything. Point being, this is not only an exercise on saying how much you like this or that president, they're thinking about how he performs on particular functions that we think are fundamental to being a good president. My impression was that they do this ranking every 4 years. Their report compares 2018 scores to the 2014 scores. There is some historiographic value to doing this same exercise regularly and thinking about how and why they change over time. Sure, the data isn't enough to be conclusive on Trump, but it's a first read and they'll do another in 2022 and in 2026 and so on. I expect his ranking will improve in time, either because the country ultimately embraces white nationalism and sees Trump as a hero, or we turn in another direction and forget the pain of the present day. You can see this play out with other recent presidents whereas older presidents' ranks are pretty much set. But I'd urge people to think of the ranking more as historiography than history. It says something about the society that makes the list. Andrew Jackson as a president hasn't changed, but his stock dropped because present-day values clash with Jacskon's. They tell me they are the part of Lincoln.
Is this a funny way of saying? ... Trump is making Obama look like the greatest President ever. After Trump leaves office, Obama rank will drop.
I had a history professor that said anything in the last 50 years is still based on news and shouldn't really be considered history. He believed that only very limited aspects of WWII were considered history. Battles, casualties, and the pure facts could but even then since it was too soon to have the proper context in which to place those facts it wasn't really worth it.
Why does a lifelong Democrat like yourself bother coming in here trolling, getting dunked on, then striking the "why do you bother" pose It just makes you look smallhanded.
I am going to preface this by saying once again I am NOT trolling, but I occasionally run across things that I suspect folks here might not encounter otherwise, so I share them. If you don't care to read this, fine, just spare me the insults. But I think this widely-reported survey has been panned by a lot of political scientists and philosophers, and for good reasons. http://bleedingheartlibertarians.com/2018/02/hooligans-play-trump-worst-president/ Hooligans at Play: Trump the Worst President? Trump is the worst president ever? So say an important subset of political scientists: That was the finding of the 2018 Presidents & Executive Politics Presidential Greatness Survey, released Monday by professors Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Boise State University. The survey results, ranking American presidents from best to worst, were based on responses from 170 current and recent members of the Presidents and Executive Politics section of the American Political Science Association. I would have hoped political scientists could put aside their current partisan resentment and answer this question somewhat objectively. Sure, I despise Trump too. But the worst president ever? Worse than McKinley and Teddy Roosevelt, who oversaw the straightforwardly evil US-Phillipine war, which left 200,000 civilians dead? Worse than Hoover, who greatly exacerbated the Great Depression with stupid interventions? Worse than Wilson, who put Americans needlessly into the unjustifiable Great War and then so screwed up post-war negotiations that World War II became close to inevitable? Worse than the long string of presidents who oversaw the extermination, forced relocation, and genocide of Native Americans? Worse than FDR, who put Japanese Americans in concentration camps? Worse than Nixon, who had to resign because of his corruption? Worse than Bill Clinton, whose sanctions of Iraq may have killed around 500,000 Iraqi children? (Note, that this number is controversial. HT: Dan Bier) Worse than Ulysses Grant, whose administration had a cartoonish degree of corruption? Worse than Polk, who unjustly seized massive amounts of land from Mexico? Now, we don’t know what their criteria are for “greatness”. Great men are often, perhaps usually, bad men. Genghis Khan, Hitler, Mao, and Mehmed V were great men, but also bad men. However, it’s pretty clear the rankings are not simply or primarily about “impact” or “bigness”. If they were, Trump would be middle of the road, not dead last, and many of the other presidents would be ranked differently. This kind of nonsense makes political science look bad. The message a casual reader might get is that political scientists are just partisan players who apparently believe brown, red, and yellow lives don’t matter. Published on: February 21, 2018 Author: Jason Brennan
@Os Trigonum, I think the panned ranking (and others, like C-SPAN's) actually do a better job than this criticism in defining the criteria. The criticism throws up a lot of morality objections -- how can you say a president if great when he's responsible for so many deaths. But, when you dig into the survey methodology on these exercises, you usually find they define particular presidential functions. This particular one from UH is more open-ended than most of them, though by asking fro grades on Trump on a number of criteria you can see the functions they are thinking of for grading. None of them are moralistic.
Washington's ranking is really going to take a hit. New Evidence Suggests President George Washington Sent Woodcut of Penis to Secretary.
Any "serious" attempt at ranking people against other people is so ridiculous. Stop worshiping people you freaks and save rankings for non-serious subjects like sports and entertainment.
