Free Republic

My column on Monday made a disparaging reference to Jimmy Carter’s famous “malaise” speech (in which, yes, he never actually used the word “malaise”), citing it as an example of the pessimism bubble that inflated in late-1970s America. Recently a narrative has sprung up, on the “crunchy” right as well as on the left, that argues that Carter was prescient rather than over-pessimistic, and that America would be better off today if we’d heeded his indictment of consumerism and self-indulgence, rather than spurning him for the go-go optimism of Ronald Reagan. This is not a crazy idea, since in many...

Ever since 1948, when Harvard professor Arthur Schlesinger Sr. asked 55 historians to rank U.S. presidents on a scale from "great" to "failure," such polls have been a favorite pastime for those of us who study the American past. Changes in presidential rankings reflect shifts in how we view history. When the first poll was taken, the Reconstruction era that followed the Civil War was regarded as a time of corruption and misgovernment caused by granting black men the right to vote. As a result, President Andrew Johnson, a fervent white supremacist who opposed efforts to extend basic rights to...

Apparently Hillary thinks that there is a comparison between what the slaves endured, to what Democrats in Congress endure.

I thought it might be fun to play a little parlor game. Below, you will find my selections for the Top and Bottom 10 Presidents in U.S. history. Lists like this are, admittedly, highly subjective by their very nature - and yet, various ranking lists from the first great original done by Arthur Schlesinger in 1948 to C-SPAN's poll in 1999 all indicate similar results for the best and worst. My results below match fairly closely to these others with mostly differences in ranking by no more than 5 spots or so. For judging the top ten Presidents in U.S....