DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum 238 Presidential Scholars rank Presidents... Obama 15th

President Obama ranks 15th out of 44 in a poll of the best and worst presidents while former President George W. Bush earns a place in the bottom five, according to the Siena College Research Institute's recent survey of 238 presidential scholars released Thursday. [See a slide show of the 10 Worst Presidents.]


Obama secured a top ten place in two skill set categories, communication ability (7th) and ability to compromise (10th), and in two personality trait categories, imagination (6th) and intelligence (8th). Background, described as family, education, and experience, proved his lowest score at 32nd.

This is the 5th time the institute has conducted the survey of U.S. presidents, which is done a year after a new president takes office. The inaugural survey in 1982 ranked then-President Ronald Reagan at 16th. "Obviously, there's not great validity to it since they've only been in office for one year," says the survey's co-director and statistician Douglas Lonnstrom. "But it's a benchmark for us to see how they move." [Take our poll: Who is the worst president?]

President tend to rank around 20th while they are in office, and Obama is no exception. His actions over the next few years will decide if he stays roughly the same like Reagan—who moved from 16th to 20th, 22nd, 16th again, and finally to 18th this year—or like Bush, who fell a dramatic 16 slots in the first poll after he left office, from 23rd to 39th.

Bush made the top twenty in only two categories, luck (18th) and willingness to take risks (19th), and he sits in the bottom five in 12 of the 20 categories, notably 42nd in intelligence, foreign policy accomplishments, and communication ability. Lonnstrom points out the unpopular former president has time on his side, explaining it takes four or five decades to know a president's true worth. "Right now there's a lot of emotion about Bush," he says. "Time passes and people become more objective, and so we'll see."

Franklin D. Roosevelt has held his title as top president since 1982 with the same four following to round out the consistent top five: Theodore Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson.

Joining Bush in the bottom five this year are Franklin Pierce, Warren G. Harding, James Buchanan, and Andrew Johnson, who is at the very bottom for the second year in a row.

The survey, which ranks presidents using 20 different factors, shows Jefferson was the most intelligent president, Richard Nixon was the worst at integrity and avoiding crucial mistakes, Lincoln had the best overall ability, and Washington was the best leader.

Here's the full list*:

1. Franklin D. Roosevelt

2. Theodore Roosevelt

3. Abraham Lincoln

4. George Washington

5. Thomas Jefferson

6. James Madison

7. James Monroe

8. Woodrow Wilson

9. Harry Truman

10. Dwight D. Eisenhower

11. John F. Kennedy

12. James K. Polk

13. William Clinton

14. Andrew Jackson

15. Barack Obama

16. Lyndon B. Johnson

17. John Adams

18. Ronald Reagan

19. John Quincy Adams

20. Grover Cleveland

21. William McKinley

22. George H. W. Bush

23. Martin Van Buren

24. William Howard Taft

25. Chester Arthur

26. Ulysses S. Grant

27. James Garfield

28. Gerald Ford

29. Calvin Coolidge

30. Richard Nixon

31. Rutherford B. Hayes

32. James Carter

33. Zachary Taylor

34. Benjamin Harrison

35. William Henry Harrison

36. Herbert Hoover

37. John Tyler

38. Millard Fillmore

39. George W. Bush

40. Franklin Pierce

41. Warren G. Harding

42. James Buchanan

43. Andrew Johnson

*There are only 43 ranking slots since Grover Cleveland was both the 22nd and 24th president; he left the White House only to return four years later for his second term.

link


Just to stir the pot a little... NOW we have proof of who is and was not a good President!

1. How is this proof? It was a survey.

2. How can you rate a president compared to other presidents when his term is only half over?

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Obama secured a top ten place in two skill set categories, communication ability (7th) and ability to compromise (10th),

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This made me lol, anyone who is reliant on a teleprompter as Obama is not skilled at communicating.

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and ability to compromise

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When has he compromised?

He has been partisan to no end.

He shoved the Health Care Crap down the American peoples' throats, because they would have had to redo parts of it to get it approved when they lost the super-majority.

What a ridiculous list. Most of our problems today can be traced right back to the cuture created by FDR,

Jimmy Carter was the worth US President in my lifetime ....... so far. He did 1 good thing ...... and that's to bore the hell out of the the leadership of Israel and the Palestinians ..... but other than that he cmpletely and absolutely lost the confidence of the people of this country ...... failing in both leadership and policy.

You realise posting this thread opened the flood gates of hell. Otherwise known as democratic bashing from republicans?

I'm an independent... the proof thing was just to stir up the conservative republicans on here a little.

I don't know how they could rate this this way. I thought it funny that Obama ranked so highly too. Obama even scored higher than Reagan!

Dude I know... lol.

Seriuosly though, it seems that those in the know think Obama is a better President than Reagan was!

Any list of presidents that has the Roosevelts, Wilson and Truman in the top 10 is a load of crock

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When has he compromised?

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Not that you won't find something wrong with it,, but I thought you should at least know..

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/promises/rulings/compromise/

Wow ....


These are the 1st 3 listed "Compromises" ......

3) The reduction is not everything Obama said he would do, but it's a substantial portion of what he sought, so for now we're going to rate it Compromise. But we'll be watching his future budgets to see if if the capital gains taxes are further reduced on small businesses, in which case we might need to change our ruling.

5) Obama has fulfilled two of the three aspects of this promise, so it's a substantial portion of his original pledge, but not everything he said he would do. For now, we're going to rate it Compromise, but we'll be watching future budgets to see if the tax credit is expanded or scaled back, in which case we might need to change our ruling


15) For our purposes here at PolitiFact, it's hard to let our Promise Kept rating stand when the fund has fallen short of its intended promise. We're going to roll back this promise to a Compromise, and keep monitoring the situation to see if how the mortgage modification fund ultimately concludes.

That's as far as I went. It seems like unless they everything is 100% what he campaigned on it's rated as a "compromise". (even if the compromise was with his own Party) Then they rate things as a "compromise" if they fall short of what they were intended to do .... or outright failed.


Hell, by that standard, everything done in any political setting is a compromise.

Bwaha.. communication ability? Here's another take on that..

webbage

Obama's style is to talk it out
Thursday, July 1, 2010 02:55 AM
By Kathleen Parker



If Bill Clinton was our first black president, as Toni Morrison once said, then Barack Obama may be our first woman president.

No, I'm not calling Obama a girlie president. But he may be suffering a rhetorical-testosterone deficit when it comes to dealing with crises.

It isn't that he isn't "cowboy" enough, as others have suggested. Aren't we done with that? It is that his approach is feminine in a normative sense. That is, we perceive and appraise him according to cultural expectations, and he's not exactly causing anxiety in Alpha-maledom.

We've come a long way gender-wise. Not so long ago, women would be censured for speaking or writing in public. But cultural expectations are stickier and sludgier than oil. Our enlightened human selves may want to eliminate gender norms but our lizard brains have a different agenda.

Women, inarguably, still are punished for failing to adhere to gender norms by acting "too masculine" or "not feminine enough." In her fascinating study about "Hating Hillary," Karlyn Kohrs Campbell details the ways our former first lady was chastised for the sin of talking like a lawyer and, by extension, "like a man."

Could it be that Obama is suffering from the inverse?

When Morrison wrote in The New Yorker about Bill Clinton's "blackness," she cited the characteristics he shared with the African-American community:

"Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas."

If we accept that premise, even if unseriously proffered, then we could say that Obama displays many tropes of femaleness. I say this in the nicest possible way. I don't happen to think that doing things a woman's way is evidence of deficiency, but rather suggests an evolutionary achievement.

Men and women communicate differently. Women tend to be coalition builders rather than mavericks. While men seek ways to measure themselves against others, women form circles and talk it out. Obama is a chatterbox who makes Alan Alda look like Genghis Khan.

The BP oil crisis has offered a textbook case of how Obama's rhetorical style has impeded his effectiveness. The president may not have had the ability to "plug the damn hole," as he put it in one of his manlier outbursts. No one expected him to don his wetsuit and dive into the Gulf, but he did have the authority to intervene immediately, and he didn't. Instead, he deferred to BP, weighing, considering, even delivering jokes to the White House Correspondents' Association dinner when he should have been on Air Force One to the Gulf coast.

His lack of immediate, commanding action was perceived as a lack of leadership because, well, it was. When he finally addressed the nation on day 56 (!) of the crisis, Obama's speech featured 13 percent passive-voice constructions, the highest level measured in any major presidential address this century, according to the Global Language Monitor, which tracks and analyzes language.

Campbell's research, in which she affirms that men can assume feminine communication styles successfully (Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton), suggests holes in my theory. She insists males are safe assuming female styles as long as they meet rhetorical norms for effective advocacy: clarity and cogency of argument, appropriate and compelling evidence, and pre-empting opposing positions.

I'm not so sure. The masculine coded context of the Oval Office poses special challenges, further exacerbated by a crisis that demands decisive action. It would appear that Obama tests Campbell's argument that "nothing prevents" men from appropriating women's style without negative consequences.

Indeed, negative reaction to Obama's speech suggests the opposite. Obama may prove to be our first male president who pays a political price for acting too much like a woman.

And, perhaps, next time will be a real woman's turn.

Kathleen Parker writes for the Washington Post Writers Group.

kathleenparker@washpost.com

I bet if the top 10 had all republicans it wouldn't be blasted for it's credibility

Yes it would ... just by you.

And for the record, I would question it's credibility too ... any poll that doesn't have GW in the top 3 ... let alone #1 is questionable to begin with.

Nice try! I support neither parties, however I find the bickering amusing

Where did I say you supported a particular party?

Well you originally said

Yes it would ... just by you.

It was without the smiley so I thought you were being serious with how you said it orginally. So I thought you were implying that I was a democrat because they naturally blast republicans and disagree with them for any possible reason. That's including something as pointless as a list such as this.

No, they usually just come out with the pointless lists and try to pass them off as "official".

I am sure that Linocln, T. Roosevelt and Ike were republicans. Washington had no party affiliation. So it is difficult to claim a liberal bias.

A good president is a good president regardless of party.

LIke I said, I knew you would find something wrong with it

Do you not also see problems with the passages I directly quoted?

I went through the 1st 3 items on the link you posted.

Their idea of compromise(s) ....

2 of the items were "only" 66% so far .... (1 of which was a "compromise with his own Party, IIRC) and the 3rd was no compromise at all ..... but since it hasn't worked at all, they consider it a compromise.

That's where I left off and stopped reading.

You can laugh, and call someone partisan .... but if you don't do any in depth reading into the methodology of the links you post, well, that's something even worse than a partisan.

Anyone who sees the King as anything other than partisan is simply not paying attention.

Compromising?

Any opinions of American college faculty members - including so-called presidential "scholars" - have to be assumed to have a liberal bias. Following is a report from the Washington Post on a survey of political leanings of American college faculties:


College Faculties A Most Liberal Lot, Study Finds

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, March 29, 2005; Page C01


College faculties, long assumed to be a liberal bastion, lean further to the left than even the most conspiratorial conservatives might have imagined, a new study says.

By their own description, 72 percent of those teaching at American universities and colleges are liberal and 15 percent are conservative, says the study being published this week. The imbalance is almost as striking in partisan terms, with 50 percent of the faculty members surveyed identifying themselves as Democrats and 11 percent as Republicans.

The disparity is even more pronounced at the most elite schools, where, according to the study, 87 percent of faculty are liberal and 13 percent are conservative.

"What's most striking is how few conservatives there are in any field," said Robert Lichter, a professor at George Mason University and a co-author of the study. "There was no field we studied in which there were more conservatives than liberals or more Republicans than Democrats. It's a very homogenous environment, not just in the places you'd expect to be dominated by liberals."

Religious services take a back seat for many faculty members, with 51 percent saying they rarely or never attend church or synagogue and 31 percent calling themselves regular churchgoers. On the gender front, 72 percent of the full-time faculty are male and 28 percent female.

The findings, by Lichter and fellow political science professors Stanley Rothman of Smith College and Neil Nevitte of the University of Toronto, are based on a survey of 1,643 full-time faculty at 183 four-year schools. The researchers relied on 1999 data from the North American Academic Study Survey, the most recent comprehensive data available.

The study appears in the March issue of the Forum, an online political science journal. It was funded by the Randolph Foundation, a right-leaning group that has given grants to such conservative organizations as the Independent Women's Forum and Americans for Tax Reform.

Rothman sees the findings as evidence of "possible discrimination" against conservatives in hiring and promotion. Even after factoring in levels of achievement, as measured by published work and organization memberships, "the most likely conclusion" is that "being conservative counts against you," he said. "It doesn't surprise me, because I've observed it happening." The study, however, describes this finding as "preliminary."

When asked about the findings, Jonathan Knight, director of academic freedom and tenure for the American Association of University Professors, said, "The question is how this translates into what happens within the academic community on such issues as curriculum, admission of students, evaluation of students, evaluation of faculty for salary and promotion." Knight said he isn't aware of "any good evidence" that personal views are having an impact on campus policies.

"It's hard to see that these liberal views cut very deeply into the education of students. In fact, a number of studies show the core values that students bring into the university are not very much altered by being in college."

Rothman, Lichter and Nevitte find a leftward shift on campus over the past two decades. In the last major survey of college faculty, by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in 1984, 39 percent identified themselves as liberal.

In contrast with the finding that nearly three-quarters of college faculty are liberal, a Harris Poll of the general public last year found that 33 percent describe themselves as conservative and 18 percent as liberal.

The liberal label that a majority of the faculty members attached to themselves is reflected on a variety of issues. The professors and instructors surveyed are, strongly or somewhat, in favor of abortion rights (84 percent); believe homosexuality is acceptable (67 percent); and want more environmental protection "even if it raises prices or costs jobs" (88 percent). What's more, the study found, 65 percent want the government to ensure full employment, a stance to the left of the Democratic Party.

Recent campus controversies have reinforced the left-wing faculty image. The University of Colorado is reviewing its tenure system after one professor, Ward Churchill, created an uproar by likening World Trade Center victims to Nazis. Harvard's faculty of arts and sciences voted no confidence in the university's president, Lawrence Summers, after he privately wondered whether women had the same natural ability as men in science and math.

The study did not attempt to examine whether the political views of faculty members affect the content of their courses.

The researchers say that liberals, men and non-regular churchgoers are more likely to be teaching at top schools, while conservatives, women and more religious faculty are more likely to be relegated to lower-tier colleges and universities.

Top-tier schools, roughly a third of the total, are defined as highly ranked liberal arts colleges and research universities that grant PhDs.

The most liberal faculties are those devoted to the humanities (81 percent) and social sciences (75 percent), according to the study. But liberals outnumbered conservatives even among engineering faculty (51 percent to 19 percent) and business faculty (49 percent to 39 percent).

The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says.

"In general," says Lichter, who also heads the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs, "even broad-minded people gravitate toward other people like themselves. That's why you need diversity, not just of race and gender but also, maybe especially, of ideas and perspective."

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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"In general," says Lichter, who also heads the nonprofit Center for Media and Public Affairs, "even broad-minded people gravitate toward other people like themselves. That's why you need diversity, not just of race and gender but also, maybe especially, of ideas and perspective."

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This is something I found very apparent at my college. It was pretty much recognized that the only faculty at the school who weren't liberal were professors in the econ/business department.

Now I went to school in Burlington VT which is a very liberal area, but not one of our PoliSci teachers were conservative. People say that teachers are able to play devil's advocate, but that is nonsense. Everyone knows how their teachers actually feel and teacher's own opinions constantly come out in class in almost any subject. Now sure, it's a college student's duty to challenge their teachers, but even when the rare occurrence occurs, students never win.


So yeah, chances are the study, made by a professor, is tainted with liberal bias. As I said, it's very difficult to be objective in a list like that, and colleges have become notoriously liberal

The first time home buyer program could well do exactly what the "easy credit" market did.

Easy Credit allowed unqualified buyers to buy homes with nothing down. It wreaked havoc on the housing and banking markets once these unqualified loans busted.

So ... what is the answer? Let's break out a new program that gives first time buyers 10% of their purchase price up to a total of $8000 ...... which can be used as a down payment and payment of their pre-paid costs.

Now .... let's also continue FHA loans that require 3.5% down payment .... oh, and let's allow both programs to be combined so that first time buyers can use the tax credit and bring zero dollars to the table ..... because that worked so well last time around .....

no down payment isn't the problem though. who cares how much down payment people bring to the table as long as they can pay their mortgage (other than an equity protection, but that is what PIMA is anyway).

ensuring people can pay their mortgage is what should be the focus.

Tell that to Dodd and Frank

People having no stake in what they bought is a large part of what caused the crisis to start with.

We typically aren't talking about people with long established credit histories. 1st time home buyers typically (but not always) fall into limited credit profiles. Limited credit profiles combined with no money of their own at stake equals a poorer risk than those who actually out their own money on the line as a down payment.

It's like when I sold cars. First time buyers with money down and a reasonable credit history were more likely to pay off their loan than a first time buyer with only rebates as a down payment.