The historical ranking of United States Presidents is all over the news today. And the Presidential rankings have some pretty agreeable conclusions.
Predictably the rankings place Lincoln 1st and Bush toward the bottom (36th). Fair enough. But there are nonetheless problems with the rankings.
First off in doing presidential rankings what counts? How many points is foreign policy worth? How many popularity? How do you decide that Clinton was a better president than Carter, or Millard Fillmore worse than Bush?
In other words the presidential rankings are highly subjective and unlikely to bring any real insight into the historical value of our presidents.
On the other hand, ranking presidents is quite fun. And there is this much to be said for it: comparing presidents helps us establish a historical standard by which we can judge the office, just let's not take it too seriously.
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