Presidential scholars who actually know what they’re talking about rank Bush dead last:
The Greatest and Worst Presidents in History.
A new Siena poll of 238 presidential scholars ranks the top presidents in American history: Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
“Teddy Roosevelt had, more than any other president the ‘right stuff’, and tops the collective ranking of a cluster of personal qualities including imagination, integrity, intelligence, luck, background, and being willing to take risks. Lincoln, according to the experts, demonstrated the greatest presidential abilities while FDR ranks first in overall accomplishments.”
The bottom five: Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, Franklin Pierce and George W. Bush.
TR and TJ are my personal favorites. And I agree that W belongs way, way at the bottom. An astounding failure on so many levels.
I liked TR from the biographies I read. My favorite quote was from a dispatch by the British ambassador who reported on his first meeting with TR (paraphrasing from memory here) “the President is really ten years old” after being taken walking, riding, to the gym and for roughhousing session with the Roosevelt children in the course of one afternoon. When asked by TR what the ambassador would like to do next he replied “If it.s all the same to you, I’d like to lie down and die now sir.” You have to admire his joie de vivre.