Presidential Rankings #1-8

I'm critiquing the presidential rankings from C-SPAN. We're at the top of the heap now. I'm guessing I'll be disappointed. Its not bad to be overrated. You have to be rated highly to start with, so there you go. We'll see how they did:

#8 - John F. Kennedy. And here we are with maybe the most overrated. I like him, but he wasn't necessarily a great president. Yes, he did well in the Cuban Missile Crisis, but Cuba only put missiles there because of his flawed Bay of Pigs invasion. Why shouldn't Cuba be paranoid and take steps to protect themselves? What else did he do? He set a goal of going to the moon. I have a goal of being able to stuff a basketball. So? He was charming. So was Warren Harding.

#7 - Thomas Jefferson. Its close between Tom and John as to who is the most overrated. He bought Louisiana - a property Napoleon was looking to unload anyway. It wasn't any big negotiation. He said all men are created equal, although it isn't clear if he was including all of his slaves in this. Let's take him off Mt. Rushmore and stick James K. Polk up there.

#6 - Harry Truman - I like Harry, but this is maybe a little high. He was popular at the start, then very unpopular, came up in time to get an upset win over Dewey, then dropped again. But a lot of the post war world was shaped by him - the CIA, the UN, the cold war.

#5 - Dwight Eisenhower - He has come way up also. I'm not quite sure why he is rated this highly. He did fine, but he seems like he's rated about 20 places too high.

#4 - Theodore Roosevelt - Definitely top five, and could be number one. There is a great book about him traveling through the jungles of South America after he was president. He nearly died there and the experience almost certainly took years off his life.

#3 - Franklin Roosevelt - Again, definitely top 5, but easily could be #1.

#2 - George Washington - Fine, although the presidency is nothing like it is today. It took weeks to communicate with other countries, so foreign policy was a slow process. It was mostly a farming economy. Had 13 states rather than 50. But hey, he's George Washington, so he belongs near the top.

#1 - Abraham Lincoln - Again, fine. But I don't know that he was really our best President. There could have been a civil war decades before, but compromises kept it together. It was only when he came in that the south left. That's not to put him down, but some of his predecessors deserve some credit for keeping the Union together for as long as they did.

There it is. C-SPAN did a pretty good job. I was glad to help them where the were a little off. You're welcome, C-SPAN.