By D. Grant Haynes

Most of the cowards crafted a headline and story lead about Abraham Lincoln being the best American president. That was hardly riveting news, but, rather, President's Day fluff.

A few timid editors covered their asses with a lead about Lincoln's vice president, Andrew Johnson, being adjudged one of the worst U.S. presidents. Again, that was comfortably safe but hardly news at all.

I want to know why no major news organization went with the most obvious angle to be garnered from C-Span's February 15 reportage of a new presidential poll--that George W. Bush (Dubya) was ranked 36 out of a possible 42 among American presidents going all the way back to George Washington.
 
Put another way, the whiz kid from Midland is in the 15th percentile on the list.  That means that 85 percent of all American presidents (35) were adjudged to have turned in a better performance than this tortured generation's George W. Bush.

The poll was taken by C-Span during December and January among 64 leading American history scholars and presidential historians drawn from a broad ideological spectrum. 

From this writer's perspective, Bush's dismal showing in the poll is a confirmation of what many of us who were voices crying in the wilderness for much of the last eight years always suspected.  We deserve exoneration.  We deserve an opportunity to gloat.

But the news organizations did not see it that way. They are apparently mostly into letting bygones be bygones--forgiving and forgetting--turning a page, etc. 

Sorry, but not this ole boy.  Not yet, anyway. 

Bush damned nearly destroyed my nation and her place in the world.  I want to see his ineptitude and criminality exposed and punished--not swept under the rug as he assumes the unlikely role of elder statesman.

Overall rankings of U.S. presidents in the C-Span poll were:

1.  Abraham Lincoln

2.  George Washington

3.  Franklin D. Roosevelt

4.  Theodore Roosevelt

5.  Harry S. Truman

6.  John F. Kennedy

7.  Thomas Jefferson

8.  Dwight D. Eisenhower

9.  Woodrow Wilson

10. Ronald Reagan

11. Lyndon B. Johnson

12. James K. Polk

13. Andrew Jackson

14. James Monroe

15. Bill Clinton

16. William McKinley

17. John Adams

18. George H. W. Bush

19. John Quincy Adams

20. James Madison

21. Grover Cleveland

22. Gerald R. Ford

23. Ulysses S. Grant

24. William Howard Taft

25. Jimmy Carter

26. Calvin Coolidge

27. Richard M. Nixon

28. James A. Garfield

29. Zachary Taylor

30. Benjamin Harrison

31. Martin Van Buren

32. Chester A. Arthur

33. Rutherford B. Hayes

34. Herbert Hoover

35. John Tyler

36. George W. Bush

37. Millard Fillmore

38. Warren G. Harding

39. William Henry Harrison

40. Franklin D. Pierce

41. Andrew Johnson

42. James Buchanan

The roster of historians participating in the poll included Douglas Brinkley of Rice University, Richard Norton Smith of George Mason University, Robert Dallek of Boston University, Edna Medford of predominantly black Howard University, Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution, and presidential biographer Lou Cannon

Characteristics on which presidents were judged included public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with congress, vision and agenda setting, pursuit of equal justice for all, and overall performance within the context of the times.

For more details, go to:
 
http://www.c-span.org/PresidentialSurvey/Overall-Ranking.aspx