The rise of Bill Clinton

In 1948, when historian Arthur Schlesinger of Harvard conducted the first respected poll of presidential historians and political scientists, Grover Cleveland was ranked No. 8 and William McKinley was No. 18.

Cleveland, who served from 1885 to 1889 and then from 1893 to 1897, was against against "special interest legislation" because he thought it would lead to a social welfare state. He created the Interstate Commerce Commission to regulate railroads. He avoided international entanglements.

McKinley, who served from 1897 until he was assassinated in 1901, advocated high tariffs to protect U.S. industries, and he was an expansionist. The U.S. drove Spain out of Cuba and gained control of Puerto Rico, Guam and the Phillippines as part of the peace settlement. In 1898, the country annexed Hawaii as well.

In 2011 though, even though none of those accomplishments had changed, a survey of United Kingdom academics ranked McKinley 21st and Cleveland 23rd.

The point is historians are fickle and there remains a sometimes wide split of opinion on several U.S. Presidents.

The latest poll was conducted by the Brookings Institute, which polled several hundred members of the American Political Science Association. The poll asked the APSA members to rank the presidents on things such as political, legislative and military skill. 

The top of the Brookings poll was familiar. Abe Lincoln was No. 1, followed by George Washington and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. One of those three have topped every one of the 18 major presidential greatness polls conducted since the first 1948 poll. If this was an AP college basketball poll, you'd say Lincoln has gotten 10 No. 1 votes, FDR six and Washington two.  

The poll got interesting at No. 7 and No. 8 where this set of political scientists placed Dwight Eisenhower and Bill Clinton.

Eisenhower, of course, left office in 1961. In a 1962 poll conducted again by Schlesinger, Eisenhower was ranked a mediocre 22nd, below such presidents as Cleveland and McKinley as well as William Howard Taft and Martin Van Buren. 

That seemed unfair to a president who presided over eight years of economic expansion and instituted the federal interstate highway system. In subsequent polls conducted by various organizations from 1982 through this last one, Eisenhower has never ranked lower than 12th and once reached No. 6 in a poll by the New York Times in 2008.

When Clinton left office in 2001, he was personally popular -- Gallup recorded his approval rate at 57 percent when he completed his second term -- but still under the cloud of having been the second president to go through an impeachment trial. 

With that blot on his record, Clinton ranked 24th in the first major poll after his presidency, which was conducted by the decidedly Republican Wall Street Journal in 2000. Still, in polls in 2002, 2005, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, Clinton ranked as low as 19th and as high as 13th until making the leap in the Brookings poll. 

Of course, I'm a numbers nut. I did a quick ranking by adding the Brookings poll with the 17 prior polls, which had been nicely gathered on Wikipedia.

President, polls included, average ranking, (high ranking, low ranking)

1. Abraham Lincoln, 18 polls, 1.56 average (highest: 1st; lowest, 3rd)

2. Franklin Roosevelt, 18 polls, 2.11 average (highest: 1st; lowest, 3rd)
3. George Washington, 18 polls, 2.72 average (highest: 1st; lowest, 4th)
4. Thomas Jefferson, 18 polls, 4.56 average (highest, 2nd; lowest, 7th)
5. Theodore Roosevelt, 18 polls, 4.67 average (highest, 2nd; lowest, 7th)

6. Harry Truman, 17 polls, 7.12 average (highest, 5th; lowest, 9th)
7. Woodrow Wilson, 18 polls, 7.17 average (highest, 4th; lowest, 11th)
8. Andrew Jackson, 18 polls, 9.56 average (highest, 5th; lowest, 14th)

9. Dwight Eisenhower, 17 polls, 9.94 average (highest, 6th; lowest, 22nd)
10. James K. Polk, 18 polls, 11.67 average (highest, 8th; lowest, 19th)

11. John Kennedy, 16 polls, 12.13 average (highest, 6th; lowest, 18th)
12. John Adams, 18 polls, 12.83 average (highest, 9th; lowest, 17th)
13. James Madison, 18 polls, 13.17 average (highest, 6th; lowest, 20th)
14. Lyndon Johnson, 16 polls, 13.25 average (highest, 10th; lowest, 18th)
15. James Monroe, 18 polls, 14.17 average (highest, 7th; lowest, 21st)

16. Ronald Reagan, 14 polls, 14.64 average (highest, 6th; lowest, 26th)
17. Grover Cleveland, 18 polls, 16.5 average (highest, 8th; lowest, 23rd)
18. Barack Obama, 2 polls, 16.5 average (highest, 15th; lowest, 18th)
19. William McKinley, 18 polls, 16.89 average (highest, 10th; lowest, 21st)
20. John Quincy Adams, 18 polls, 17.89 average (highest, 11th; lowest, 25th)

21. Bill Clinton, 12 polls, 18.5 points (highest, 8th; lowest, 24th)
22. William Howard Taft, 18 polls, 21.11 average (highest, 16th; lowest, 29th)
23. George H.W. Bush, 13 polls, 21.38 average (highest, 17th; lowest, 31st)
24. Martin Van Buren, 18 polls, 23.69 average (highest, 15th; lowest, 40th)
25. Rutherford B. Hayes, 18 polls, 24.33 average (highest, 13th; lowest, 33rd)

26. Gerald Ford, 16 polls, 25.88 average (highest, 22nd; lowest, 32nd)
27. Jimmy Carter, 16 polls, 26.44 average (highest, 18th; lowest, 34th)
28. Chester Arthur, 18 polls, 26.44 average (highest, 17th; lowest, 32nd)
29. Benjamin Harrison, 18 polls, 28.11 average (highest, 19th; lowest, 34th)
30. Calvin Coolidge, 18 polls, 28.17 average (highest, 23rd; lowest, 36th)

31. Herbert Hoover, 18 polls, 28.83 average (highest, 19th; lowest, 38th)
32. James Garfield, 11 polls, 29.64 average (highest, 25th; lowest, 33rd)
33. Zachary Taylor, 18 polls, 30.00 average (highest, 24th; lowest, 34th)
34. Richard Nixon, 16 polls, 30.00 average (highest, 23rd; lowest, 38th)
35. Ulysses S. Grant, 18 polls, 31.06 average (highest, 18th; lowest, 37th)

36. John Tyler, 18 polls, 32.72 average (highest, 22nd; lowest, 37th)
37. Millard Fillmore, 18 polls, 33.33 average (highest, 24th; lowest, 38th)
38. William Henry Harrison, 11 polls, 35.18 average (highest, 28th; lowest, 39th)
39. Andrew Johnson, 18 polls, 35.5 average (highest, 19th; lowest, 43rd)
40. Franklin Pierce, 18 polls, 36.22 average (highest ,27th; lowest, 41st)

41. George W. Bush, 6 polls, 36.67 average (highest, 19th; lowest, 39th)
42. Warren Harding, 18 polls, 37.83 average (highest, 29th; lowest, 42nd)
43. James Buchanan, 18 polls, 38.11 average (highest, 26th; lowest, 43rd)

The Brookings poll is the second to include Barack Obama. Obama ranked No. 15 in his first poll, the Siena College presidential rankings in 2010. In the Brookings poll, Obama slipped to 18th. Still, considering some of the accomplishments of the Obama years -- health care reform, ending the Great Recession, the auto industry bailout, the killing of Osama Bin Laden and now the nuclear arms talks with Iran -- his rankings could vary greatly in the coming years depending on how those actions resonate with future historians.

A look at George W. Bush's rankings show how much opinion can shift on a president in a short time. Bush II first was ranked in the 2002 Siena poll, shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He came in 23rd. In 2005, in a Wall Street Journal poll, the economy was performing well and the war in Iraq was just two years old, Bush improved to 19th.

The next major poll was released in 2008 by the New York Times. At that time, the economy had slipped in to the Great Recession and the war in Iraq was still a chain around the U.S economy's neck. Bush slipped to 37th in that poll and hasn't come in higher than 31st since.