THE LEADERS WE DESERVED (AND A FEW WE DIDN'T): RETHINKING THE PRESIDENTIAL RATING GAME

By Alvin S. Felzenberg

When the elder Arthur Schlesinger conducted the first presidential ratings poll back in 1948, a panel of professional historians rated Andrew Jackson a handsome 6th, just behind Thomas Jefferson. When the younger Schlesinger (who had won a Pulitzer prize for his admiring study, The Age of Jackson) conducted the next of these polls in 1962, Jackson again finished 6th.

Yet in later surveys, Jackson’s standing has declined. C-SPAN’s 1999 poll consigned him all the way to 13th place.

How can this be?

Well imagine yourself a historian, asked to assign a numerical value to Jackson’s role in American history. On the one hand, he was a decisive executive, the first president to act as a head of government as well as a head of state. He championed national unity against secessionist threats, helping to postpone the civil war for a generation — until such time, as it happened, when the North was strong enough to prevail in a sectional conflict, as it was not in 1830.

On the other hand: Jackson was an economic idiot. When he forced his ideas about banking and finance into effect, he precipitated the worst financial crisis in the nation’s history to date, the crash of 1837 — which in turn triggered the harshest and most prolonged depression of the 19th century, from 1837 to 1843, a depression that Milton Friedman regarded as the only downturn comparable to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

Jackson was also a brutish white supremacist, whose expulsion of native tribes from the eastern United States bears uncomfortable comparison to the atrocities of Slobodan Milosevic.

So — 6th place? 13th place? Higher? Lower? Or maybe — silly question?

Alvin Felzenberg, former spokesman for the 9/11 commission, and a longtime friend of NR leans toward the “silly question” answer. His new book, The Leaders We Deserved (And Few We Didn’t): Rethinking the Presidential Game, confounds all past participants in the game with a minute and detailed analysis of the question and subdivision of the answer. It is as if an NFL coach wandered into a neighborhood touch-football game to critique the style of play. Felzenberg breaks presidential performance into categories and subcategories, assigning scores in each and arriving at some startling results. (John F. Kennedy, whose star has tended to decline in recent years, jumps back into the upper brackets.)

Everyone interested in the role and history of the presidents of the United States — and judging by the global media attention to the US political process, that means almost literally everyone — will benefit and enjoy Felzenberg’s intricate and subtle analysis. But in taking the game more seriously than it has ever been taken before, Felzenberg incidentally exposes the game’s core problem: The attentively it is done, the more the false clarity of a number and a rank fades into the complexities and ambiguities of biography.