It must be remembered that the survey published by Wall Street Journal, referenced in David Beito’s post below, did not use any objective criteria to give the President’s their rankings. All that really counted was subjective opinion.

However, in a book titled Reassessing the Presidency: The Rise of the Executive State and the Decline of Freedom, edited by John V. Denson and published by the Mises Institute, someone did use a measurable basis to rate presidential performance. In the tome’s first essay, “Rating Presidential Performance”, Richard Vedder and Lowell Gallaway used data on federal government spending as a percent of total output along with size of government and inflation to determine the standing of each President. In their ranking based on federal spending Harding came in third and FDR came in dead last and in the one using size of government and inflation Warren Harding came in first.

Yet, it seems that to the majority of the historical profession if America was at peace and the people were prosperous then the President must have been a bad one.

David T. Beito - 6/12/2004

All of the "good" presidents have one thing in common: they were demobilizing from expensive wars. A president would have be pretty awful not to cut back total spending after a war. One wonders how they would fare if the ranking was limited to domestic spending only.

Keith Halderman - 6/12/2004

In the Vedder/Gallaway overall ranking using all of their measures the top five in descending order were, Truman, A. Johnson, Harding, Clinton, and Nixon. The bottom five in descending order were Ford, Hoover, Wilson, Lincoln, and FDR. I would say number two and number five are kind of suprising.

David T. Beito - 6/12/2004

Sounds interesting. I will check it out. Who were the other highly ranked presidents? Any surprises?