primetime continues thursday with the people and events that shaped the civil war and reconstruction. at 8:00 p.m. eastern, a look at sherman's march through the carolinas. at 9:00 p.m., lectures in history features the story of civil war veterans. at 9:55, examing john brown and the election of 1860. and at 11:30 p.m., lectures in history on slavery, women, and the civil war. thursday, the atlantic council hosts a discussion on russia under president vladimir putin. the panel looks at the relationship between president putin and the leader of chechnya. that's live here on c-span 3. thursday, book tv in primetime features books on education. at 8:00 p.m., "the battle for

room 314." at 8:50 p.m., the national association of scholars report on reading lists for incoming college freshman. at 10:20 p.m., a panel for the tucson book festival on education. the need for horses on the farm began to decline radically in the 1930s. it was not until the 1930s that they figured out how to make a rubber tire big enough to fit on a tractor. and starting in the 1930s, the 1940s, you had an almost complete replacement of horses as the work animals on farms. i do believe in one of my books on horses i read that in the decade after world war ii we had something like a horse

holocaust, that the horses were no longer needed, and we didn't get rid of them in a very pretty way. >> sunday night on "q&a" robert gordon discusses his book "the rise and fall of american growth," which looks at the growth of the american standard of living between 1870 and 1970 and questions its future. >> one thing that often interests people is the impact of superstorm sanidy on the eas coast in 2012. that wiped out the 20th century for many people. the elevators no longer worked in new york. the electricity stopped. you can't charge your cell phones. you couldn't pump gas into your car because it required electricity to pump the gas. so the power of electricity in the internal combustion engine to make modern life possible is

something people take for granted. >> sunday night on c-span 3. american history tv on c-span 3. this weekend on saturday afternoon at 2:00 eastern, law professor jeffrey rosen talks about the influence of former chief justice john marshall.

blossoming for the chicano movement. >> for the complete schedule, go to c-span.org.

on lectures in history, dickinson college professor david o'connell examines presidential legacies and what factors contribute to making a presidential term successful. he discusses several rankings of presidents and compares the criteria and results. his class is about an hour and ten minutes. >> four score and seven years ago our forefathers brought forth on to this continent a new nation conceived in libber tir and dedicated to proposition all men are created all kwaequal. the brilliance of those words wasn't necessarily recognized at the time. in fact, lincoln was not the featured speaker at gettysburg. it was actually edward evert, a senator from massachusetts, who spoke for two hours while lincoln waited until the end to

give his closing words. today, of course, we recognize the gettysburg address as perhaps the greatest moment of presidential speech in history. i think the fact that people didn't necessarily see the speech that way at the time that lincoln wasn't the featured speaker at gettysburg points to the fact that lincoln's greatness wasn't necessarily recognized at the time in general. you have to remember that when lincoln became president, he hadn't served in public office for ten years. his country style of dress, his speaking mannerism, his self-education, all that was meant lincoln was looked upon with some degree of kond session from the eastern elite in the country. perhaps not much was expected from his presidency. however, today, there's little dispute on lincoln's greatness. i encourage my students to see political science not as a science but a debate. there are no laws, there are no findings, there's no discoveries. instead, what you have who are people making argue ulments thay

or may not be persuasive to you. that's important to note when we think about presidential greatness. we're going to look at five different ways of measuring presidential greatness. what he will see -- these polls, these academic studies that involved hundreds of historians, political scientists and others, there's a consensus that lincoln was the greatest president. today, we may have some concerns about some of the thing ez did. that he certainly took libber 'tis with the constitution. he suspended the right of habous corpus. he closed newspapers that were printing material critical of the union effort. he spent money that congress hadn't appropriated. the raised the size of the military without congress' approva approval. did he this for a great end. preserving the union at a time of maximum peril for our country. he had the ee manse indication proclamati proclamation. he nerve lost sight of what the

united states was fighting for. there was a lot of pressure in 1864 to call off the presidential election feeling you couldn't go through with an election at a time of war. lincoln would be justified cancelling this contest. what lincoln said was -- what lincoln believed was that if the united states were do to do so, the rebellion would have won. what i want us to do today is think about presidential greatness. the whole class has been leading up to this point. we have been studying presidential power, leadership, trying to understand how presidents are or are not able to overcome these obstacles in their way when they can successfully navigate the challenges and when they fail to navigate the challenges. the point of doing so is to become great achieve greatness. i want us to think about how we might understand presidential greatness, how we might conceptualize it. we will look at ways that different scholars have tried to rank the presidents. from one to 44.

and then we're going to talk about why potentially today greatness is more difficult to achieve. we may never see another person like abraham lincoln. the modern presidents, they have been weak. they have not achieved the level of greatness the people like lincoln have. we want to try to understand why that might be. and if there are reasons or if the fault really lies in the individuals who hold the office in recent terms. one thing we know is that americans love to rank things. i estimate that maybe 67% of the contest on the internet are lists of things. this is buzz feed. it's lists. here are some interesting rankings that i recently came across in the hard work that have i been doing as a professor. the definitive list of stupid people on twitter, let me tell you, version 4.0, better than 3.0 and 2.0. the internet's 25 worst pass

wortds. if your password is on the liver, it's saying enough. top 25 college football teams ranked by stupidity of fans. a ranking of every big brother season from worst to lead worst. the 26 best drake meems that have exited. that is kind of cool. the definitive ranking of the 50 worst selfies. i looked at that one. the message is don't take selfies at funerals. that's the takeaway point there. americans also love ranking their presidents. we have read the presidential power, the most famous book ever written on the presidency. a book that has been influential for scholars and presidents alike. a guidebook of how to successfully exercise executive authority. very first sentence of the book, the united states -- in the united states, we like to rate a president. we measure him as weak or strong and call what we are measuring his leadership. we do not wait until a man is dead. we rate him from the moment he takes office.

that's true. gallop begin sur vagveying amers on obama's presidency the day after his inauguration.úñh8 that rating, that starts immediately. of course, there are all these benchmarks that are set in a presidency where we stop and consider their legacy. 100 daze, how does the president's first 100 days compare to franklin roosevelt. the re-election campaign, the ultimate opportunity for vote torz cast judgment on presidential performance. you have pundits and columnists who are asking how anything a president does affects their legacy. a way of saying how it affects their place in history. even though we like do this, ranking the presidents is actually really hard to do. so there's some systematic reasons why it's difficult to try to rank presidents. it's difficult to rate their performance. number one, we're not neutral observ observers.

we all have our own opinions. we all have our own biases. that will affect hour we evaluate any president's performance. research has shown that ideology play a role in assessments of presidential greatness. this does not come as a surprise to you. conservatives of will think ronald reagan say great president. liberals will think john kennedisy great president. the impact of our biases doesn't stop there. it's also going to impact the criteria we use to determine presidential greatness. what our standards are. research has shown liberals are more likely than conservatives to think that something like idealism is a standard of presidential greatness. those are two ways that our biases will affect our evaluation of greatness. we also know that context matters. presidents take office at different times facing a different set of leadership challenges. that's going to have to be taken

into account when we try to rate their performance. on the one hand, we might give presidents sympathy for taking office in difficult circumstances. if we think about barak obama, at the end of his presidency, we may want to step back and say, you know what? he took office at a time of a massive recession, with the united states engaged in two wars, and because of all these challenges, even if he didn't achieve quite as much as other presidents, that he deserves to be rated higher because the context in which he served was more difficult. we know that voertz aters are c of doing this. at the time of his re-election, if voters considered obama and bush to be equally responsible for the country's economic condition, then obama would have been nine points less popular. people seem to be willing to give presidents leeway for necessarily have a lot do with. but difficulty is not necessarily a bad thing. because crises, they can be opportunities for greatness.

i don't think it's a coincidence that the two greatest presidents, we will see in the rankings, that the top three is always the same. it's some combination of lincoln, then washington and then roosevelt or roosevelt and washington. it's always the same. two of the presidents served in perhaps the biggest crises that america has seen. civil war and then world war ii and great depression. that gave them an opportunity to do things other presidents who served in more calm times might not have had the chance to do. didn't necessarily mean they would meet the challenges. but it was something that they could potentially do that others could not. this is actually clinton lamented. after 99/11, clinton said he wished he was president at that time. you had to have a signature moment of leadership. he never had the opportunity do so. a third problem is that presidential greatness is not set in stone. when we rate presidents, those ratings, they will change over

time as new information emerges. and as our own values change. an example of a president whose ranking has gone down over time would be john ken dichlt den. when john kennedy died, he was popular. he died under tragic circumstances. and the first appraisals of his presidency were written by people who had worked in kennedy's presidency, held him in extremely high regard and didn't criticize really anything that he had done. but over time, we have learned new things about kennedy that has affected our opinion of him. we have learned about his chronic womanizing, womanizing that jeopardized his personal security as he was involved with prostitutes and other people that his staff procured for him. womanizing that general ard diesed his independent ens. the afear with the mob boss. womanizing that would be sexual

harassment, involved with white house secretaries and employees within the government. we learned he has some responsibility of the unths involvement in vietnam, foreign policy that wasn't in america's national interest. we learned that a lot of the new frontier was more for show than anything echls kennedy didn't have an interest in domestic policy. all the talk that his administration had about culture, those were thing were personally important. he seems to be a president that in the critics' eyes showed more profile when he needed to show more courage to play on his book title. as a result, in the last ranking that we're going to look at of political scientists in 2014, john kennedy was selected as the most overrated president. the most historically overrated president. two presidents who have gone in the other direction, their reputations have improved, are truman and icen hour. when truman left office, he was unpopular. approaching where nixon was when

he left office as a result of the watergate scandal. in february of 1952, harry truman hit 22% in public opinion polls. just 22% approved of the job he was doing as president. but since then, we have come to see that his foreign policies had a lot of wisdom to them. establishing nato. sheparding the marshal plan through congress. these things were seen as essential members to forestall soviet expansion throughout europe. truman's demeanor, his uponesty, plain spoke b ways, we gained greater appreciation for that when he was succeeded by lincoln johnson who lied to the country about the involvement in vietnam and richard nixon who was not a crook when he actually was a crook. eisenhow eisenhower, another press who has been improved, whose ranking improved over time, when eisenhower left office, people thought he had been a nice guy but he had not really worked hard at his presidency. he had spent more time golfing than leading.

he was a presider, not a president. new archival evidence has shown that was an image that eisenhower allowed people to have of him. he worked extremely hard behind the scenes to point of pushing himself to heart attacks. he claims to not engage in personalities. but he manipulated people left and right. and generally speaking, we have developed an appreciation for his political skills that people didn't have at the time. we also value some of the decision s eisenhower made as president that back then didn't necessarily seem significant. 1954, the french fall in vietnam, there's pressure on eisenhower to intervene. he says no that a ground war in southeast asia cannot be won. therefore, should not be fought. ten years later, the united states begins to seriously get involved in vietnam and we have a decade-long conflict that doesn't work out in our national interest, that seemed to be a wise decision with a lot of foresig

foresight. in 1958, as people are argue the government needs to boost defense spending in response to sputnik, eisenhower warns against an industrial complex. a warning that seems press enter. this is why i also mention bush. not saying bush is going to go down as a lincoln. we don't flow where bish is going to go down. when bush left office, people wrote columns, some scholars rated him as the worst president of all time. for me that was preposterous. he had just finished his presidency. so many of the thing ez did, we're not going to know the true impact of those decisions until decades from now. if years from now iraq and afghanistan become free democratic societies that are bell waerns of change, lead to a spread of freedom, then ultimately, it does away with one of the key national security threats facing the united states, terrorism, then bush is going to down as a great president. is that likely to happen? it doesn't seem that way. but we don't know.

we have to wait and see. it's too early to be sure about where bush is going to fall in the pantheon of presidents. another problem is do you get point for trying? there are a lot of presidents that successfully identified key issues before they became issues of national concern. they were on the right side of history. they took importance moral stances. but they didn't do anything to actually fix the problems. 194, truman spoerss a strong civil rights plank in the democratic party platform. kennedy in 1963 finally comes out in favor of comprehensive civil rights legislation in congress. something he dragged his feet on he promised a number of steps for civil rights, including ending public discrimination -- discrimination in public housing which he could do with the stroke of the presidential pen. didn't actually take action until the pressure got to much in 1963. they're on the right side of the issue. but they don't get that legislation through congress. it's not until lyndon johnson is president that we see comprehensive receive you will rights legislation.

how does that affect aan evaluation of their gradeness. do they get credit for being on the right side of an issue or do we blame them for not fixing the issue? the issue of credit is a problem in general. a lot of times the accomplishments that we're willing to attribute to a given president are debatable accomplishments. whether they actually had something to do with those things or not. it's something that is open for discussion. a lot of timeless people say the president is great because the economy was great. this is used to make an argument for roosevelt, his great accomplishment is that he ended the great depression. is that true? well, not really. things that roosevelt did certainly helps the united states set itself along a path for recovery. public works programs are needed in the immediate aftermath of the start of the great depression. his financial reform legislation helped set the contact for more stable economy going forward.

but by 1937, country has fallen into a massive recession. you be employment is around 20%. the thing that pulls the united states out depression is, of course, world war ii. can we fairly say that roosevelt ended the depression? a lot of people think that's a great president do. but it's debatable. similarly, some scholars have said that the reagan winning cold war is the greatest foreign policy accomplishment of any president in the post-war period. did reagan win the cold war? i mean, not really. did he do things to help end the cold war? absolutely. reagan's program of increased defense expenditures, including strategic defense initiative, star wars missile defense system, forced the soviet union to engage in an arms race at which they were no longer capable of doing so. that triggered reforms that ultimately led to their downfall. but other people had a role, too. pope john paul ii, you take them

out of the picture, maybe we get a different outcome. you can argue the soet jeff union had internal vulnerabilities that meant it was going to collapse some day anyway. maybe reagan hastened that collapse. but he didn't necessarily cause it. these are two of the biggest accomplish mentes that these presidents who are seen as great, reagan is on the edge of the top ten now, are often given credit for. another problem is is it fair to compare pre-modern and modern presidents? when we look at rankings of prosial greatness, we're going to put in the same system barak obama and george washington. but their tasks of leadership, the resources that they had to lead, they were very different. those premodern presidents, presidents before franklin roosevelt, were more clerks than they were leaders. the 19th century, the main job of the president was to distribute patronage. they would appoint people to government offices.

it was a thankless task since a president even gets assassinated for his role. james garfield assassinated in 1881. there's no instin institutional support for the president. it's not until 1857 that congress appropriate aides money for the president to hire a clerk. they wind up paying thur own staff, the few staffers they have, out of their own pocket. george washington hires his nephews to copy his letters. presidents have to take loans like thomas jefferson. it leads to andrew saying being president was a situation of dignified slavery. it may be very unfair to compare premodern presidents to modern presidents. off the was different, challenges were different. forget about being leader of the free world. it's not until roosevelt that a president even leaves the country. a related problem is do we just presidents by the standards of their time or ours snz our morals have changed. weaver going to have impressions of greatness. that is going to play a role in

terms how we interpret what they did in office. things that may not have been controversial then are very con electroshell now. i call this a andrew jackson problem. by many standards, andrew jk son is a great president. we define a whole age by limb. the age of jackson. jack sewnian democracy. jackson imhimself is a symbol. he is a frontiers man who by reaching the presidency sends a powerful message about what is possible in this new country. his common rhetorical support for regular people changes our politics. he democrat of course kra advertises government service by ending the practice of treating government jobs as if they're personal problem, they would hang on to for their entire lives and then pass on to their sons and he builds the first mass base political party, democratic party, which is really forging out of his own personal following. he was a slave owner. but, he was a perhaps most closely associated in addition to his democratic impulses with

backing forcible remove afl native mens from their triefbal land in open defiance of supreme court decisions. when the cherokee nation is forced out of their lands in georgia, a forth are going to die on the trail of tears out to the midwest. this leads to a lot of problems in terms of how we interpret this. owning slaves, not treating native americans with respect, that was not something thaefs controversial in the early 19th center try. that's why you see a lot of state democratic parties. they are typical yearly fund-raiser is the jefferson jackson dinner. many of them have moved to change their name, feeling that associating a dinner with slave owners like jefferson and jackson is not projecting the image of inclusiveness they want today. finally, can we really understand what it's like to be president? this is the monday morning quarterback problem. i watch the dolphins on sunday, as you all know.

tannehill throws an interception. i will blame him. i will get upset. have i no idea what i'm talking about. i have never played quarterback in the nfl. i don't know why he through that intersecti intersection, if it was actually the receiver in the wrong place or maybe the defense decided their coverage in a way that wasn't on the scouting report. the coaches need to be blamed. i can't blame him for that interception. similarly, can we really blame a president for any of their failings? we don't know the pressures they are under. we don't know how decisions were made. we don't no what information they had the to act. it might be kind of unfair of us to cast judgment on something we have no change of understanding until we have walked in those shoes ourselves. and that's why someone like john kennedy when talking with arthur sleshing ger about list system of ranking the presidents was dismiss i have. saying that you don't really know what's going on. i'm not even prepared to do this. i would need more study having been in office for just a little time. now that we have said we can't

rank presidents, we can't rate them, let's do it 234i weigh. so let's startd by considering some theoretical ways of asse assessiasses assessing greatness. standards almost of this problem. one book argues that a great president must by ademocrat and a republican. small d dp, small r republican. what they mean is that you have to involve people in the process and teach people civic virtues. that's the democrat part. you have to govern within the constitutional system and abide by restrictions on your authority. that's the republican party. for them, the key mechanism to accomplish these as it kz is a political party. a great way to mobilize people into the process. but also a natural check on the president's aristocratic impulses as they see t. for them, great presidential leadership requires extraordinary part shan sp. the great presidents are those who built up their political

parties. and thus people like washington, jefferson, jackson, lincoln and fdr are great presidents. you can see using the standard, why andrew jackson is a great president. building the not earn democratic party out of his personal following. if they included something like presidential character, maybe it's not going to mean that jackson is a great president. no president since fdr according to them has achieved this level of greatness. two closest would be lyndon kron son and ronald reagan, johnson fails they say because his embrace of civil rights split apart of the democratic party, drives southern democrats eventually to the republicans. and reagan fails because he's not really interested in helping the republican party. he is more interested in protecting his personal populari popularity. an i'll tur naive way would be why moderates make the best president. which you are all familiar with now. he argue that the key to greatness is muscular moderation.

that does not mean simply doing what is pop ou lar as the moment. that would be spineless centerism. he attacks clinton for. muscular moderation is boldly governing from the center. it's charting a leedzership path between the extremes and bidding the consensus around your political position. this leads him to reinterpret the politics of presidents like fdr. fdr is seen as potentially the most liberal chief executive in the modern era. but according to troy, he was really awe moderate. because on the left, he is dealing with people who want to create a socialist society in america. on the right, he is dealing with individuals who want to do nothing. who want to make tan a laissez-faire system of economic regulation like that which flourishes under coolidge and hoover. by charting a course between the two, he was quite moderate. something like social security, troy says it's a moderate poll six people on right don't like it because it may destroy

individual responsibility. people don't love it because it is finances in a pay as you go where the taxes of workers go to pay benefits of current beneficiaries. so as a result, it's a moderate policy. his approach towards regulating banks another moderate policy. left wanted them nationalized. the right wanted fewer regulations. roosevelt falls smrl somewhere in the middle. moderation anot enough to achieve greatness. you have moderate presidents like nixon and cart bhoer fail for reasons specific to themselves. but it offers best path to presidential greatness. i chose these two in particular because i think it illustrates the problem of even setting standards of presidential greatness. these are diametrically opposed standards. one scholar is saying, to be great president, you have to be partisan. the other scholar is saying to be a great president, you have to do the exact opposite. you have to be in the middle.

if we then try to actually rank presidents, from one to 44, we have five i think really important historical studies that have try dodd this. i think looking at each of them is useful. 1988, send questionnaires to about 2,000 ph.d. holding assisted professors of history who were listed in the american historical association's guidebook. these questions nairs were intense. 19 pages, 180 dwes, toor more than an hour to complete. they're not only asking people to assign a level of greatness to each presidency. what they're also asking them are specific questions about events and policies. was hoover right to value balancing the budget and controlling the federal deficit? . why was kennedy successful? what skills were important? by asking those additional questions, they also want to determine why a president is great.

not only if they are great. i'm not going to look at that part of the argument. we're going to focus on these evaluations of whether scholars assigned ranking of great, near great, above average, average, below average or failure to each president. ultimately, have 846 surveys. be wear that this isn't necessarily a representative sample. only 59 women actually participated in the survey. abraham lincoln is one. franklin roosevelt is two. george washington is three. thomas jefferson is four. those are the four presidents that had an average score of being a great president. the near greats were theodore roosevelt,ing will son, gentleman sock and harry truman. then i think the bottom two are interesting inclusions. john adams and lyndon johnson. we will not see these presidents on other rankings. this is partly because in the study, scholars tended to more

favorably rate the presidents that severaled in the area -- in the era in which they did their research. if you did research on colonial america and the early american republic, you would be more likely to think john adams was a great president. we today perhaps criticize him harshly for the alien acts. it criminalized dissent as the united states was gearing up for a war with france enforcement was mrit kalt. onned amanies' opponents affiliated with jefferson. lyndon johnson, another president who servely will be a controversial. scholars like his domestic policies. find a lot to desire in his prosecution of the vietnam war where he conceals the true extend of the united states involvement from the public. and makes a number of tactical decisions that potentially under mine the chances of the united states prevailing.

in 1997, published rating the presidents. they take a poll of 719 people. 97 of these individuals were professors of american history or political signs. the other individuals would be some public officials, attorneys, and so forth. they are asking the sample to rate presidents on five different dimensions. leadership qualities, accomplishments in crisis management, political skill, appointments, character and integrity. participants in the event asked to rank the relative importance of the five dimensions. if you think character was most important to presidential greatness or leadership qualities. according to this system, again, lincoln is number one. roosevelt is number two. george washington number three. thomas jefferson is number four. roosevelt number five. woodrow wilson six. harry truman number seven.

andrew jackson number eight. eisenhower number nine. madison number ten. a couple of interesting things to note here, one is that roosevelt actually might have prevailed over lincoln if it weren't for concerns about list character. that he was rated 15th best president in terms of character. he is one or two on the other four dimensions. similarly, andrew jackson would rate higher if it wasn't for those concerns about character and appointments. obviously, a reflection of the spoil system where all government officials were fired and then people loyal to jackson were put in these positions. this leads ultimately to a lot of corruption in the long-run. i would point out the appearance of eisenhower. you can see this is published in 1997. now as be learn aboutize hour, you see his rating improve and he starts to emerge as bottom of the lists.

an article in 1997 taking a poll of 32 experts. i put experts in quotations because they're his friends. not that they're not experts. but mostly they are historians, some practicing politicians were included march mario cuomo, paul simon, united states senator. participants are allowed to develop their own criteria for greatness in the article he actually uses justice potter stewart's definition of obscenity. you know it when you see it. scholars will know greatness when they see it. all people have to do is rate each president as great, near great, average, below average or failure. and then they will be assigned the appropriate numerical score which allows us to come up with an average. his father actually did an early study of ranking the presidents in 1948 that was published in life magazine. he was kind of following in his

father's footsteps. according to this study, lincoln is number one. washington is number two. franklin roosevelt is number three. all three achieve great averages. you can see that all 32 individuals gave lincoln a score of four. a ranking of great. then it's jefferson, jackson, roosevelt, wilson, truman, polk and icen hour. c-span actually did a presidential leadership survey in 2009. surveying 65 presidential historians. i mentioned this because we read and talked about the scholars ourselves in this class earlier in the semester. historians are asked to rate the president on ten different attributes. public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, inder national relations, administrative skills, relations with congress,

vision/sending agenda, whether they pursued equal justice and performance within the context of their time. you may be saying, that's a lot. ten attributes is a lot for any scholar. it tests the limits of the knowledge of even experts. do people know enough about, say, franklin pierce to assign him a score on all ten of these demention snz what hands in studies like is that people wind up making a global judgment and then that's going to affect their score on every individual standard. if you think that lincoln was a great president, you will give hmm a great score and all ten categories. participants are assigned each's president score of one. what will happen then is that an average will be provided. if clinton was give an average of, say, an 8.2 for economic management, that will be multiplied by ten and he will

get 82 points. what that means is that you are total possible greatness score is 1,000. 100 points for each category. according to this system, abraham lincoln number one, with a score of 902. george washington number two. roosevelt number three. you can see the scores pretty quickly drop off after that point. roosevelt four. truman five. kennedy six. jefferson seven. eisenhower eight, wilson nine and reagan ten. first appearance of ronald reagan at the very boundary of greatness. finally, we have a survey in 2014 of 162 members of the american political science association president and executive politics session. that includes me. i participated in the survey. you can't tell you that much about it unfortunately because it has not been push lished as

far as i can tell. they have had newspaper stories in "the washington post" and so forth about the research. they e-mailed all the participants in the study. the final rankings. but i don't really remember what it was like. i remember it took me a long time. it took me 45 to -- to an hour. i remember being kind of surprised by some of the decisions i made. for instance, i found myself being a lot more positive towards barak obama than i thought i would be when i was challenging to think about him on individual dimensions instead of a global judgment of his performance. some of the attributes that were measures would be diplomatic skill, integrity. legislative skill. you can see that's reflecting a political scientist's mind set when you include legislative skill. something we know that political scientists have tried to mesh and quality tie. each president receives a possible score out of 100. the results, lincoln is number one. almost a perfect score, 95.27.

washington number two. roosevelt three. theodore. truman, eisenhower. a first appearance for bill clinton. andrew jackson and woodrow wilson ten. again, you see down here the score is lower even though they are not separated that far in the rankings. the scores are actually quite lower. some patterns then that we may have noticed. lincoln is number one in all five rankings. consensus, lincoln is the greatest president. all five rankings also agreed that the top three greatest presidents are lincoln, washington and fdr. you probably notice that washington and fdr alternated between two and three. evenly split among the five. jefferson and roosevelt did well. they were pretty commonly four and five. neither president fellower that

be seven in any of the five rankings. and we didn't look at this. but i thought you should know that there's agreement on the worst presidents. the two worst presidents would be harding, who spent his time writing love letters embarrassing love letters to his mistress while his friends robbed the government blind. his most famous quotation, i am not fit for this office and i should never have been here. and james buchanan. could be grat lagss america, dickinson's own james buchanan. who did nothing as the country lurched toward civil war out of a misguided sense of constitutionalism. one of the other things we may have noticed in the pattern, we're not seeing many modern presidents post-franklin roosevelt show up on the rankings. clinton shows up once. reagan shows up once. truman is there. eisenhower is here and there. they're at the bottom. it's not consistent.

what i did here is i took the presidents since roosevelt, all five ratings. i averaged out their score. bear in mind that these are taken at different times. the total number of presidents that are going to be ranked is not constant throughout this. presidents -- there are more presidents in 2014 than in 1988. that will affect the average, maybe somewhat. if great presidents came after that point. that really doesn't turn out to be the case. what we can see here is that only two presidents have an average ranking in the top ten. harry truman and dwight eisenhower as i said earlier, both of them have enjoyed a renaissance, rehabilitation of their reputation after they left office. even then, the rankings aren't that impressive. if you are the seventh greatest president of all time, then you are not even in the top 20%. right? going down the list, we can see that it gets pretty bad.

nixon is 32. ford, 25. reagan, 18. bush, 20.25. clinton, 17. bush, 36. if we took the average ranking of all these presidents, it's 19th. these presidents since franklin roosevelt receive an average ranking of 19th greatest. why is that? is that the result of their individual flaws? well, to some extent, sure. over the course fts semester, i have been very critical of jimmy carter. not out any personal opposition to anything he tried to accomplish. but out of a criticism of his understanding of executive authority and his use of the powers of the leadership. carter's ranking as we saw -- we flip back for a second. not good. 25, 19, 27, 25, 26. pretty consistently mediocre. and we can identify very

specific reasons that carter fell short of greatness that only he can be blamed for. one is he under mined the prestige of the presidency. prestige is key. how the president is viewed by people outside or rather how the president is viewed by people in washington trying to determine how the public views him. that's key to barg ang. whether the president is able to successfully convince people that what he wants is in their own interest. carter didn't seem to understand that. he did things like carrying his own luggage. ending the practice of playing hail to the chief when the president arrives at a public event. selling the presidential yacht. giving a national address in a cardigan sweater. say that being someone who loves cardigan sweaters. he doesn't necessarily understand that these things make him seem more like a regular person instead of someone who is above the public.

he made poor staffing choices. carter decides to bring the individuals who would work with him in georgia to washington. the so-called georgia mafia. who didn't fit in with their scenes and shaggy hair cuts. they owe fepded the sensibilities of washington. 'pointed poorly prepared people who had no national experience to the jobs where you needed national experience. when it came to specific individuals. he picks hamilton jordan as hir chief of staff. he is known for unsaufshry personal behavior. spitting on women. making lewd comments about the cleveland of the wife of the. using cocaine at a disco. he appointed burt lance to run management and budget. he is a friend from georgia who describes himself as a country banker. he is put in charge of shepardsing the federal government when he is $2 million in debt personally. he is going to be involved in a series of investigations about

list own personal finances that are going to drag down carter's entire first year in office. third problem that carter had is that he thought he could run the whietd house on his own. despite ford having learned quickly that you need a chief of staff, carder comes into office and he accesses his own chief of staff having all hig top aides report directly to him. and then he is trying to make every decision limbself. that winds up bogging carter down in a series of unnecessary details. this is a true story. carter would actually approve the playing schedule at the white house tennis courts. why would a president bother themselves with that detail? carter also had some character flaws. he had some degree of arrogance. you have that in the troy reading that you did where when people disagreed with limb, he would say, then i would rather not talk with you if you can't agree with me. not the con sense suss building approach that you need as a president. he had somewhat of a mean streak

which really emerged in the 1980 presidential campaign where he says if reagan is elected, you will see a return to segregation in the united states. carter didn't realize that a president's best resource for working with congress is his own party. he comes into office. you have a democratic congress. speaker of the house tip o'neill. that's a relationship you need to cultivate. o'neill says, give me four or five priorities and we will work on them. caster says here is 12. we will do all. o'neill says don't try to govern over our heads. carter says, i will do what worksed for me in georgia. o'neill is aggravated by little slights like his ticket at the inauguration that carter took away breakfast because even nixon gave them breakfast. ult patly what winds up is that carter gets primary by ted kennedy. mangen that. a sitting president who has to fight who his own renomination within his party. that's a direct consequence of the way that carter failed to nurture those relationships with

democratic leaders in congress. finally, he overestimated his speaking powers. did he try to power over congress. carter gives five national addresses. each one shows a smaller and smaller audience. we know that speaking powers, grossly overestimated. when the president goes pub lik, they can't move opinion on their approval ratings. they certainly can't move issue opinion either. carter didn't recognize that. i would ask you as well, who are some of the great quarterbacks? i'm going a little football theme today. who are some of the great quarterbacks of nfl history? i imagine that you are going to say modern-type quarterbacks. tom brady, peyton manning. someone who would have said dan marino, because they would have tried to suck up to me. that would have been a good answer. dan marino was the best -- he

would have been greatest president because of his quick release and his fiery demeanor on the field. these are modern presidents. -- modern quarterbacks. and that is a reasonable thing when you look at statistics. these are the top ten quarterbacks in terms of yards in a season. what we see here is that all besides dan marino historical season in 1984 where he threw for 5,084 yards and 48 touchdowns, they have all happened since 2008. these great seasons in terms of the yardage that presidents have thrown for. and you see quarterbacks that simply are not going to go down as great quarterbacks like matthew stafford, drew brees, ben roethlisberger, probably not hall of fame-type quarterbacks. what's happening here? the difference is that the game changed to help quarterbacks. you have seen an emphasis on

officiating that makes it easier to throw the ball. officials are concerned with concussions. so they are going to police contact over the middle of the field. brian dau kins, all-pro safety for the eagless, he felt co-no longer play the position because he had to constantly be worried about getting a penalty. he can no longer react. you can't touch a quarterback. you can't hit him up high. can't make contact with the helmet. you can't lead with the crown of your helmet. you can't hit him at the knees. that makes quarterbacks more comfortable in the pocket. you have seen new offensive systems that preference short passes. instead of runs. it makes it easier to rack up yards. you see quarterbacks get to the nfl with more preparation because colleges and high schools have adopted sophisticated offensive systems. so quarterbacks are better prepared to read defenses. when they reach that level. you see a change in personnel that teams have. someone like gronkowski, the pe teams have.

tom brady gets to throw to somebody that's kun everable by safeties and linebackers. but if we lack at those systemic changes, when it comes to the presidency, things are changed to make it more difficult for president to achieve greatness. some of this things to think about. one, congress has polarized at the roots of polarization are long standing. you can date it back to the 1960s as the democratic party fully embraces civil rights with, you see a migration of the southern democrats to the republican party and ultimately that's going to leave a democratic party that is just left with liberals and a republican party much more conservative. when you throw in the increase of gerrymandering where you've

got the safe districts that mean a very radical republican or democrat can win a seat that they wouldn't be able to win if it was fairly drawn, you see harsh use of congressional rules and procedures that create pa larized outcomes in congress. all of this means it's more difficult for presidents to get what they want out of congress. polarization made speed up action in the house but it slows it down in the senator. we've seen a steady increase in filibusters over times. the senate is the barrier ground. who are you going to negotiate with? there's no one left in the middle. the affordable care act passes with zero republican votes in the house and zero votes in the senate. how is obama going to get it through congress now that he doesn't have the huge democratic

joorts that he had when he took office in twain. a related problem. divided government, the president of one party and congress of the other. that's become the norm. we've seen divided government two thirds of the time since 1952. there's a debate about that means. some argue that divided government doesn't have an effect on significant legislation. david mahue has categorized laws in terms of significance by looking at a if they were judged significant at the time they were pass and if they were judged significantly later over history. when you come up with that data set, you see about 11 to 12 significant laws are going to be adopted every two-year of government. if that's true, there is strong research that shows that legislation, significant legislation is more likely to fail under conditions of divided government, an additional 6.7

potentially significant laws fail in every period of divided government. it increases the múó$ of potentially significant legislation failing by 45%. the fact that the presidents are, like obama now, having to deal with a divided government with a congress controlled by the opposite party and a congress that is polarized being led by the opposite party is going to make it difficult to get your agenda through congress. the president also has a worse relationship with the media. think about all of the things that the media covered up for john kennedy. they covered up his affairs which they knew about. they covered up his health problems, his addison's disease and a variety of ailments that would have shock the public if thad known at the time. they covered up the fact that he didn't write his books and that his book was only a best seller because his dad bought thousands of copy which he stored up at an attic in their place. i've been unable to persuade my dad to buy hundreds of copies of my books to make it a best seller but it's a good ideas.

that changes. you have things like the pentagon papers, secret government study about the united states involvement in vietnam which shows that presidents has misrepresented u.s. policy. you have the aftermath of watergate and nixon's repeated lies about his involvement a coverup, so much so that his press secretary is going to hav9 to later say that all previous statements were inoperative. and that you see then because of the impact of exposing watergate, reporters now all want to be bob woodward and karl bernstein. they want to break the next scan l. the media is much more hostile towards the president. there's no longer the collaborative relationship that the presidents counted on. the amount of negative news that the president has to face has gone up and the president's total share of news coverage have gone down. both of which make it more difficult for the president to lead publicly. that's related to this fourth problem. people are paying less attention

to presidential addresses. we might think that now that you can watch a presidential speech on so many different platforms, broadcast, cable, on your phone, on your tablet, on your computer that you're going to see higher ratings for presidential speeches. that's not what has happened. presidents used to benefit by a having a captive audience where there were just a few channels and if the president comes on to give a national address, people would just watch because what else were they going to do, turn off the tv and talk with their families? i don't think so. they were going to watch the president on television. now you can opt out. you change the channel, fire up your xbox, cue up netflix, whatever you want to do. so obama's recent 2015 state of the union address had the lowest rating in 20-something years, only 31 million people decided to tune in. i always like to remind people of this problem with bill clinton in 2000, preparing to give a national address, it's

coming on right after "who wants to be a millionaire" on abc which was the hottest show of the time. i told you i auditioned for it. that 19 million people are watching who wants to be a millionaire. clinton comes on and immediately 10 million people change the channel. another problem is that the permanent campaign is a permanent distraction. running for office today, running for reelection, it's expensive. it costs money. these are billion dollar campaigns we're talking about now. and that means that the president has to constantly raise money. barack obama, according to research has attended a fundraiser every 7.5 days, every 7.5 days he's attended a fundraiser. bill clinton attends his first fun raid raiser as president 12 days in into his administration. how are presidents supposed to govern when they're so busy raising money. they're too because zi trying to keep their job to potentially do

their job. there are also powerful fiscal pressures that any president has to deal with. about 70% of the budget today goes to four things, medicare, medicaid, social security and payments on the national debt. throw in defense spending, which is something that can't be adjusted, all that much, especially in light of recent events, that leaves very little money for the president to fund new domestic policy initiatives, types of great activist programs that we often associate with presidential greatness. we're running, this year, if we're lucky wbts a $400 billion deficit and those problems are going to worsen until he gain control over the entitlement programs. presidents also struggle to fill their administrations. they can't get their appointments confirmed. if we're talking about appointment to the federal judiciary, the rate of

confirmation for the appointments has gone down over time. where a president like eisenhower would get every appointment to the federal court system confirmed. now you're lucky to get 50% to 60% confirmed. and the amount of time it takes to confirm a justice has gone up dramatically. the "the new york times" last week had an editorial criticizing republicans for not acting more quickly on some of the nominations that obama made to the judicial branch since some of the seats are judicial emergencies. they've been vacant for four years. look agent the executive branch, those appointments have run into obstacles forcing president to use debatable techniques to get people into office, things like recess appointments, czars and so forth. we're talking about their staff, right, can't get them to stick around. right now we're seeing that 30% of the white house staff in any given year is going to change jobs. if you add the two together, that that means is you really have a government of strangers,

individuals are not in their office long enough to learn what's necessary to do well in their jobs, nor are they in office long enough to learn who they need to work with to get things done. they can't be an effective team when they serve for such a short period of time. finally, people say well the way around this, the way to achieve greatness is just to act on your own. unilateral presidential power. this is a fallacy too. these unilateral powers are consistently overrated. people say governed by executive order. well studies show that only 15% of executive orders are significant. there are exceptions, of course. truman desegregating the military, bush's stem cell research executive order. certainly some significant policy established by executive order. and we know that new president consist come in and change these things, sometimes they're durable, like clinton changing the arsenic standards in

drinking water, when bush wants to go back to the previous standard because he thinks it's cost effective, it makes him look like he wants more arsenic in drinking water. these sometimes have a good way to make policy but only 15% are significant. and presidents statistically are more likely to govern by executive order at the end of their administration and when they're unpopular which makes perfect sense given their limitations. think about obama's experience that he doesn't turn to executive orders on immigration and climate change until he failed on attempt to get congress to do things on these problems. what's happening? his immigration plans are tied up in the court system and the outcome remains to be seen. if you're talking about presidential proclamations, 88% of these are symbolic, only 12% are significant. the 12% tend to be on things like park and trade and nothing else. we're talking about executive

agreements, these are much less useful to a president than treaties which are much more binding and bind the president's successor as well. so to govern unilaterally is a debatable strategy as well. what i would ask you then is first if we take a step back, what are your standards of presidential greatness? we've seen how different scholars have tried to defined presidential greatness, that they say it's about building political powers, troy says it's about moderation. the different systems include political skill, character, legislative skill and so forth. this is the first question how to defined presidential greatness and we'll consider whether greatness is still possible. yeah. >> the way i defined presidential greatness was based off whether a path was able to set and pass a meaningful legislative agenda quickly and then whether they're able to

mitigate outside events national and international that would distract nem from being able to pass their legislative agenda. i think for me one of the shis with troy's argument and with a lot of the way that we look at presidents is that over time their ability to do things decreases regardless of the president. you see that in jfk's last two years of his presidency he was unable to pass civil rights. he was unable to pass any of his economic legislation and it took johnson to get that through. what i look for is rapid action and being able to mitigate things that would prevent people from acting quickly. >> do you think it's somewhat of an issue though that a president's ability to get things through congress is going to be out of their control depending on the numbers that they have in congress? so johnson had a great advantage in that he had these huge democratic majorities that other presidents had not had. >> right. i mean, i think that the thing

is, i don't think it really matters whether or not they have substantial majorities, because you see people like reagan who, correct me if i'm wrong, didn't have huge substantial republican joorts and never has. >> no. >> he was able to get through most of his agenda in the first six months by using the budget process. i was really incredible. i don't think it really matters the actual number of people in your party. i think it matters whether you're able to use the legislative process to get things done that you want to get done. >> reagan had conjectural factors working in his favor too after carter's failed presidency. where he saw the peak of conservatism in american politics and he gets a boost of his surviving the assassination attempt and the likable way that he handled that too. other standards of greatness? yeah, jerry. >> i believe that great

presidents come down to timing because of great events. kind of like fdr, you might think about going into the second world war that made for greatness on his part. we might think of when president reagan came into his office, he was dealing with an economy that was tanking. other events might be president obama, he was able to pass something that other presidents for 60 years could not do which was health care reform. all those are great events that allow them to prove their greatness. so i think as much comes down to timing and circumstances is what it comes down to the actual president. >> so do you agree with clinton that you kind of need a crisis to be a great president? >> i do agree with that assumption that you need a crisis or something that you can prove yourself. you might have the potential, but if you don't have the circumstance or the event happen, there's no way to actually prove that you're a great president. >> it's a return to the football analogy i've been using. you don't know if a team is

great until they beat another great team. you need to have that challenge. other standards of greatness that people would propose? >> i think it depends more on how you handle yourself as a person. so i think, you know, i think it's really great if you can get legislative matters through and the crisis you're afforded as a president. but to able to manage that with other political advisers in the private scene and then in the public to kind of portray this, you know, character of oh i have it all under control and it's all going smoothly. but then to have those political deals in private because of polarization in congress. >> i think that's a really good point too. you have the public and private dimensions of leadership and each presents different challenges but you probably can't be successful unless you successfully navigate each part. so what do people think? is greatness possible anymore? is greatness possible or is this

average ranking of 19th just the result of individual failures people like carter, not living up to our expectations? >> i think that -- i think that with the standards that you put out, i think that a lot of them you can overcome. so like the powerful fiscal pressures if you a great president they can overcome those pressures and deal with them. or if they were able to use unilateral powers that stuck. and i think doe vieded government and polarization, i don't think they're permanent conditions. and even if they are, i mean, you see presidents like obama and bush being able to get an incredible amount done in their first year. that advantage hasn't gone away, which most presidents during a unified government have been able to take advantage of. so i think that you know, a great president can use those same -- that same kind of momentum and overcome some of the challenges you mentioned. >> that's a good point.

we talked about polarization. but even obama, he had a very productive first year. presidents still have able to make the system work, right, not all the time and it becomes much more difficult later on. yeah. >> i think the presidents nowadays can be great in certain areas with but i don't think they can achieve greatness overall. i think a president can be good in the public sector, the private sector, good at using unilateral powers or negotiating with congress but i don't think they can do it all. there's so many different roles of the presidency nowadays, i don't think one president can manage all of them and be great at everything. >> that's a really good point too. we know that the roles, the expectations for these roles often conflict. if you're going to be chief of state you have to be broadly popular and you have to participate in these ceremony observanc observances.