Presidents Day suddenly not so hard on Buchanan’s legacy
Presidents Day came and went without disrupting very much about our basic understanding of the holiday, even as the third Monday in February remains an essential cultural beacon that signifies, uh, stuff, like 20% off at Harbor Freight Tools.
Yeah, that’s come and gone, too. It’s over. You had a chance at 20% off on the variable speed reciprocating saw — that’d be your 6 amp — and 20% off your 20-gallon oil-lube air compressor.
Fortunately, not even the nationwide expiration of various discounts can dampen the holiday spirits of the descendants of James Buchanan, the only president from Pennsylvania, who is widely considered by scholars, political scientists and assorted additional observers to be the worst American president ever. Well, not any more. Both the most recent scholarly ranking and the one before that have sent Buchanan fleeing from the basement, replaced first by Donald Trump in a survey of 170 members of the American Political Science Association, then by Andrew Johnson in a project by the Siena College Research Institute. Thus, Buchanan’s winning streak as “not the worst president ever” has hit a solid two.
Heady days.
Born in 1791 in Cove Gap, near what’s now
Mercersburg, Franklin County, Buchanan is roundly blamed for greasing America’s slide into the Civil War, which somehow obscured his prodigious talent for accumulating comic nicknames like “Old Buck,” “Old Public Functionary,” “Sage of Wheatland” and “Ten-cent Jimmy.” He was also called “the Bachelor president,” as he is the only man to go into the White House a bachelor and come out the same way. Just enough of his writings indicated he was likely gay that Pete Buttigieg would not be able to claim the mantle of America’s first gay president.
That might not be the only thing preventing it, but still.
Serious students of the presidency have been putting out rankings since the mid-20th century, and even though they’ve been appearing more frequently since 2000 — when a CSPAN survey of historians delivered a top five of Abe Lincoln, George Washington, Franklin Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman — no one even pretends such rankings are in any way scientific. They clearly don’t aspire to even a semblance of the way rankings ought to be done, which is obviously by sportswriters or coaches every week during the season.
If the scholars would just adopt that model, they wouldn’t even have to rank all 44 presidents (Grover Cleveland was president twice, hence Mr. Trump is the 45th). They could just deliver the standard Associated Press or coaches poll of the Top 25, and you’d never hear of James Buchanan again, or John Tyler, or Millard Fillmore, or Richard Nixon, or Warren G. Harding, or Franklin Pierce.
Should they be so moved, pollsters could augment the Top 25 with the traditional Others Receiving Votes paragraph, where you might find a bone thrown in the direction of James A. Garfield, Martin Van Buren, Zachary Taylor, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter.
But if you think the people who put out the college basketball polls are biased, you should inspect the backgrounds of the presidential rankers. In the recent APSA survey, 57% of the responding political scientists said they were Democrats, while only 13% identified as Republicans. Independents and “other(s)” made up the remaining 30%.
This allows Mr. Trump to dismiss his 44th of 44 ranking, even though there was no further breakdown of the Democrats into “Radical Left Democrats,” “Sad Joke Democrats,” “Radical Liberal Democrats,” “Treasonous Democrats,” “Unhinged
Democrats,” “Crazed Democrats” or “Far Left Radical Democrats” — all subsets established by the Trump Twitter feed.
There was no celebrating from the White House when Andrew Johnson was installed at 44 by the Siena survey, but it was notable that Johnson dropped to 44 exactly 150 years after his impeachment while Mr. Trump got there one year before his.
The intellectuals say presidencies are best viewed from 30, 40 or 50 years out rather than by the tweet of the moment. Johnson himself has been ranked anywhere from 44th to 19th, Rutherford B. Hayes anywhere from 33rd to 13th, Dwight D. Eisenhower from 21st to fifth, and Ronald Reagan from 22nd to sixth, all because of the way history eventually layers itself.
In terms of fluctuation, Mr. Trump has the most in common with Lincoln and FDR: Their rankings haven’t varied by more than three slots. Lincoln and FDR were always ranked between 1 and 3; Mr. Trump between 42 and 44.
“HAPPY PRESIDENT’S DAY!” Mr. Trump tweeted Monday morning, misusing the apostrophe. I hope and suspect that that was because he doesn’t know where to put it. But I fear it was because he does.