Historian liberal bias works against Republican President rankings
Image via WikipediaCall it history’s conservative curse.Woodrow Wilson was a terrible president and should be in the bottom 10 and not the top 10. John Kennedy was also overrated. Johnson created a mess of Vietnam and destroyed the black family with his Great Society. Obama has no more business in the top 10 than he does getting a Nobel Peace Prize.
According to a University of Miami study, those historical rankings of American presidents that pop up every year or so are significantly weighted in favor of Democrats, thanks to the liberal leanings of academia.
Political science professor Joseph E. Uscinski, one of the study’s authors, said the new analysis shows that the overwhelmingly liberal academic community consistently ranks Republican presidents about 10 spots lower than the public would.
“I don’t think anyone is surprised,” Mr. Uscinski told The Washington Times. “Among the political scientists and historians that I work with, Democrats outnumber Republicans 8 to 1.”
What was eye-opening, he said, was the stark difference between the historians’ assessments of Republicans and the grades given by the public.
“On average, all the Republicans get the short end of the stick,” he said. “But the one it impacts the most is [Ronald] Reagan. It’s often difficult for people to fathom why he’s ranked as low as he is.”
The University of Miami report, to be published in the scholarly journal White House Studies, looks at presidential rankings from historian Arthur Schlesinger’s seminal 1948 survey through more recent polls, including the Wall Street Journal’s 2005 list and C-SPAN’s 2009 survey.
In the C-SPAN rankings - the focus of much of the University of Miami analysis - Reagan in 2009 broke into the Top Ten, behind Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Thomas Jefferson, Dwight Eisenhower and Woodrow Wilson.
But on other surveys, the late conservative icon falls much lower. A 2010 Siena College poll has Reagan at No. 18, behind Bill Clinton, Lyndon Baines Johnson and Barack Obama.
Downgrading the performance of Reagan and other Republicans, including Gerald R. Ford, Richard Nixon and both Bushes, George H.W. and George W., Mr. Uscinski said, has an impact on how people view the presidency today and in the future.
“When progressive or liberal presidencies dominate these lists, those attributes begin to be associated with the criteria of what makes a great president,” he said.
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There are some great conservative writers out there who have done good work in writing about Presidents, but probably none of them could get a job in a history department because of the liberal bias.
Reagan was smart enough to end the cold war. Liberal Democrats would have been content for it to continue and some are even nostalgic for it. Perhaps that is one reason why they tend to denigrate him.
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