A day to celebrate leaders

Presidents’ Day collapses the old holidays celebrating the birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln into a single day. It is a good time to reflect on what Americans want in their presidents, and the chasm between how liberal scholars rate U.S. presidents and the leadership qualities American citizens expect from their chief executive.

One well-known survey is the Presidential Greatness Survey, which asks hundreds of scholars to rank the U.S. presidents. What made national news recently was the drop of George Washington from second (after Lincoln) to third place (after FDR). The other shock for many readers was the elevation of Joe Biden to No. 14 on the list, ahead of successful, and popularly re-elected, presidents such as Ronald Reagan, William McKinley, and Grover Cleveland.

What reasoning could possibly move Franklin Delano Roosevelt ahead of George Washington and Joe Biden to 14 out of 45? By the way, Donald Trump was ranked last.

The highest marks typically went to statist, activist, interventionist chief executives, including those willing to go far beyond legal and congressionally-mandated boundaries in remaking America. Those who presided over massive growth in federal spending and entitlement programs made up most of the top ten, including Truman, Obama, Eisenhower, and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Case in point: To these idealistic scholars, FDR is not remembered for leaving America woefully unprepared for World War II, for trying to pack the Supreme Court with cronies, or for Keynesian economics that led to a second recession in 1937. No, it was his willingness to use federal power unlimitedly to reshape society that is seen as heroic.

Fortunately, the co-authors of this interesting study are transparent about where the data comes from. It turns out that approximately 80% of respondents were liberals. One can see the difference that this makes in the rankings. Conservatives’ top five (in order) are George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, FDR, Teddy Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan. Democrats drop Reagan to 18! Or, compare how Republicans and Democrats view George H. Bush and Joe Biden: Republicans put Bush at 19 and Biden at 33; Dems put Biden at 13 and Bush at 30.

The liberal bias tells us something about American higher education, but it also suggests that there is a gap in perceptions of “success,” not just between conservative and liberal scholars, but also between the intelligentsia and American citizens.

The most obvious recent case is Ronald Reagan, who turned around a faltering economy that set up a quarter century of overall American economic expansion. Reagan was the indispensable leader who won the Cold War and made the world a safer place. Somehow Barack Obama was nominated for the Nobel Prize within weeks of his first inauguration and is lauded as No. 6 by the intelligentsia, but it was Reagan who faced down the Soviets, envisioned and signed arms control agreements, rolled back communism in our own backyard, and presided over a major economic rebound. No wonder that, despite the derision of some elites, Reagan was returned to office with a crushing landslide in 1984.

A second measurement overlooked by liberal elites is economic performance. It is a historical fact that the times of greatest economic expansion and prosperity, across most sectors and income levels, have largely been during Republican (or conservative) leadership: the so-called Gilded Age (1876-1888), the early 1900s (McKinley, Roosevelt, Taft), the 1920s, the 1950s, and the long-term effects of Reaganomics (1980s through much of the Clinton era). However, budget hawks such as Calvin Coolidge receive little acknowledgement for working within the limits of the Constitution while overseeing the conditions for innovation and growth.

A third area missing from the survey is leadership and character, particularly when a president is called upon to act on behalf of the national interest at personal cost. John Adams was not only a morally upright individual who deeply loved and was faithful to his wife and family, but he also offered selfless service to the nation. While president, Adams was maligned for his unwillingness to go to war to assuage American pride. (The United States had legitimate grievances against both France and England during his presidency.) He resisted his party and public opinion, and he lost reelection yet saved the country from a disastrous war.

That was leadership, and leadership is what public opinion polling routinely cites leadership as among the traits most prized by citizens. That is why the public opinion polling of Jimmy Carter and Joe Biden was so bad (high 50% disapproval), in contrast to their top 20 status among the liberal scholars. It also explains how so many of the liberal elite predicted a Democratic victory in 2024 and were stunned at Donald Trump’s strong showing among so many different categories of Americans.