The good, bad and Coolidge

One of the more intriguing parlor games historians play is "rate the presidents." The latest entry comes from National Interest editor Robert W. Merry, whose book Where They Stand has some of the usual suspects at both top (Washington, Lincoln, FDR) and bottom (Buchanan, Pierce, Fillmore).

But Merry's approach goes a step beyond the usual by acknowledging that such retrospective rankings tend to favor liberal Democratic presidents because the academics doing the ranking tend to be liberal Democrats. He therefore argues that we must also take into account how presidents were viewed by voters in their own time, as reflected by whether they were granted second terms and left their parties well-positioned at the ballot box after leaving office.

So what do we find when we look at presidents from the past century or so when setting aside the verdicts of biased historians and focusing on election returns only (while still recognizing that voters are fallible)?

First, that FDR stands out, just as the historians claim. Because he not only won a record four presidential contests (the second by a landslide even bigger than his first) but because he also saw his vice president, Harry Truman, hold on to the White House in 1948, three years after his death. There was clearly a strong belief that FDR and the Democratic Party in general deserved to lead the country during the Great Depression, World War II, and the early years of the Cold War.

Second, that Ronald Reagan was indeed the right's version of FDR (and not just in the sense that his political career was largely defined by a struggle against the welfare state Roosevelt ushered in). Reagan defeated an incumbent Jimmy Carter by a larger than typical margin for a challenger in 1980, was re-elected by a landslide comparable to FDR's 1936 landslide, and then saw his vice president (George Herbert Walker Bush) go on to essentially give his administration a third term by a decisive margin in 1988. Those Republican victories signaled the final collapse of the New Deal coalition FDR had constructed 50 years earlier.

When we get to the other two-term presidents--Woodrow Wilson, Dwight Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush--firm conclusions are more difficult to draw.

Although both Eisenhower and Clinton presided over decades of relative peace and prosperity and easily won second terms, neither was able to quite pass the torch on to their vice presidents, with Richard Nixon narrowly losing to John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Al Gore winning the popular vote but narrowly losing the electoral college to George W. Bush in 2000.

The experiences of Wilson and the second Bush were also similar, albeit in similarly dismal ways. Wilson was re-elected in a close race in 1916, but then saw his second term rendered a shambles by a brutal recession and a failed struggle to gain U.S. entry in the League of Nations. The result was a Democratic nominee in 1920 (James Cox, after a sick and shattered Wilson chose not to run) who got only 34 percent of the vote against a non-entity named Warren Harding.

Bush was, of course, the first candidate since Benjamin Harrison to win the presidency while also losing the popular vote. Like Wilson, he managed to prevail in a tight re-election contest four years later, only to suffer a terrible second term, during which Hurricane Katrina, the war in Iraq and various other missteps led to his party's loss of both chambers of Congress.

The final verdict was delivered when the GOP presidential nominee, John McCain, was decisively beaten in 2008 amid financial crisis by an astonishingly undistinguished first-term senator. Merry consequently considers both Bush and Wilson among our worst presidents.

When it comes to the one-termers, the most interesting case is surely Calvin Coolidge. "Silent Cal" assumed the presidency when Harding died from a sudden heart attack two years into his term, but then won the office in his own right in 1924 by a record 26 percent popular-vote margin. Coolidge could have easily won re-election but admirably decided six years in the office was more than enough and passed on the presidency instead to his Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover, who won with an impressive 58 percent of the popular vote in 1928, just in time for the stock-market crash.

As a final point, and as Merry acknowledges, most rankings of presidents favor not just liberal Democrats but also "activist" presidents who had ambitious (even if ultimately failed) agendas. That bias is an unfortunate one for those of us (including the founders) who have a different conception of the presidency and of the federal government in general than contemporary liberalism prefers.

Which is perhaps just another way of saying that Coolidge was a great president because he did as little as possible, cut the federal budget wherever possible, and had a habit of ringing for his bodyguards and secretaries and then hiding under his desk.

At the least, it might be refreshing to once again have a commander in chief who believed that "the words of a president have enormous weight and ought not to be used indiscriminately" and who stressed competent governance and results more than empty speechifying.

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 06/09/2014

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