How Africa
A new study by C-SPAN has former of the United States President Obama positioned among the top third of leaders ever and among the best ever in a few classes.
The C-SPAN study, the third of its kind since its beginning in 2009, was discharged on Friday. It requested that 91 presidential antiquarians rank the 43 previous presidents in different classifications to think of a composite score, bringing about a general positioning.
President Obama was ranked twelfth among all former presidents. His rankings in the various categories are as follows:
Crisis Leadership (15), Public Persuasion (10), Administrative Skills (19), Relations with Congress (39), Vision/Setting an Agenda (12), Performance with Context of Times (15). Moral Authority (7), and Economic Management (8).
President Obama’s economic management is among the most controversial of the C-SPAN rankings. The former president inherited a deep recession from the Bush administration; however, there is competing blame for the economic crisis. The president carried over the banking bailouts of the Bush administration and added an $830 billion stimulus package; the latter’s evaluation ranges from successful to a complete failure — though the program fell short of its own stated goals.
The unemployment picture under President Obama is heavily disputed, as well: during his tenure, the official BLS unemployment rate fell from 8.3% to 4.8%. While some emphasize the 10.7 million jobs added during the Obama presidency, others point out the part-time nature of many jobs and the historically low labor force participation rate, which fell to a 38-year-low of just 62.4%. The record 95,102,000 Americans currently out of work include “people over age 16 who are no longer working or even looking for work.”
The eight years of the Obama presidency saw historic underperformance in terms of alleviating poverty and improving the lot of the middle class. The number of Americans using SNAP benefits or food stamps swelled to 43 million. Income inequality increased; the president stated early in his second term that 95% of income gains went to the top 1% of Americans.
President Obama’s critics point out the $9 trillion in public debt accrued during his term as a complicating factor for any claims of economic success; while other economic observers highlight that budgets passed under Obama added $6.576 trillion, and yet others only hold the president accountable for $983 billion. The Federal Reserve held interest rates historically low until December 2016, raising them only during the last days of the Obama presidency.
Nevertheless, former President Obama oversaw the slowest recovery since World War II; by comparison, the economic recovery under former President Reagan, who also faced serious adverse economic headwinds, led to relatively high GDP growth and a boon to Americans entering the labor force.
Ronald Reagan was ranked ninth among all presidents, and sixteenth for economic management. Former President Bill Clinton was ranked at fifteenth all-time, a few rankings below Obama. Former President George W. Bush climbed a few spots from thirty-sixth to thirty-third, as pointed out by Politico.
The following is the complete list:
1. Abraham Lincoln
2. George Washington
3. Franklin Delano Roosevelt
4. Teddy Roosevelt
5. Dwight Eisenhower
6. Harry Truman
7. Thomas Jefferson
8. John F. Kennedy
9. Ronald Reagan
10. Lyndon Johnson
11. Woodrow Wilson
12. Barack Obama
13. James Monroe
14. James Polk
15. Bill Clinton
16. William McKinley
17. James Madison
18. Andrew Jackson
19. John Adams
20. George H.W. Bush
21. John Q. Adams
22. Ulysses Grant
23. Grover Cleveland
24. William Taft
25. Gerald Ford
26. Jimmy Carter
27. Calvin Coolidge
28. Richard Nixon
29. James Garfield
30. Benjamin Harrison
31. Zachary Taylor
32. Rutherford Hayes
33. George W. Bush
34. Martin Van Buren
35. Chester Arthur
36. Herbert Hoover
37. Millard Fillmore
38. William Harrison
39. John Tyler
40. Warren G. Harding
41. Franklin Pierce
42. Andrew Johnson
43. James Buchanan
The Trump presidency is yet to be ranked, although that will undoubtedly be something political observers look forward to debating in the years ahead.
