Is Biden Really the 14th Greatest President in American History?

By Daniel Greenfield @ Sultan Knish Blog

The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey has officially announced its results. And the survey from the American Political Science Association says that Obama is greater than Eisenhower and JFK, that Bill Clinton was greater than John Adams and Biden is greater than Reagan (not to mention Ulysses S. Grant and James Monroe of the Monroe Doctrine).

Is Biden really the 14th greatest president in American history? Obviously not. But these same “political science experts” also ranked Obama as the 7th greatest president, Bill Clinton as the 12th greatest president and Carter near the upper middle as the 22nd greatest president.

The Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey reflects the partisan hijacking of American history within academia. The top level of the rankings have been stacked with contemporary Democrats with FDR in 2nd place, Truman in 6th (just behind Thomas Jefferson), Obama in 7th, LBJ in 9th, JFK in 10th, Bill Clinton in 12th, Biden in 14th place and Woodrow Wilson in 15th.

If you believe academia, every single White House Democrat in the last hundred plus years, except Carter, ranks among the top 15 presidents in American history. What are the odds?

Only Clinton, who was impeached, Carter, who was a widely hated one-term president, and Biden, who is as unpopular as Carter, failed to crack the top 10.

This isn’t history, it’s revisionist history so shameless that it would make a Communist blush.

It is also no coincidence that no 20th century Republican who remained in his party cracks the top 10 except Eisenhower, that even Reagan ranks below Biden at 16th, George Bush I falls to 19th, Ford to 27th, slightly above Martin Van Buren, a corrupt and despised Tammany Hall leader (and one of the fathers of the Democratic Party), George Bush II is down in 32nd place, Nixon at 35th and Trump at 45th. Of the pre-New Deal Republicans, Coolidge is at 34th, Harding at 40th, and Hoover at 36th. In these same rankings, Biden is in 16th place.

The rankings represent an attempt at overruling the consensus of the age. Truman was widely unpopular, yet is named the 6th greatest president for little more than remaining at the wheel during the end of WWII, then presiding over the loss of China and near disaster in Korea, while Eisenhower, who was far more popular, takes 8th place after Obama. LBJ, who left office rejected by his party and the country, after disasters on every front, is ranked in 9th place.

But as wrongheaded as those rankings may be, at least Truman and LBJ presided over crucial moments in history and made momentous decisions. One can point to some of their accomplishments, but what did Obama accomplish to honor him as the 7th greatest president?

That is besides the same thing that led to him receiving a Nobel Peace Prize and a Grammy.

And what exactly entitles Bill Clinton to the 12th spot ahead of John Adams, Reagan, Grant, Monroe, Andrew Jackson and other genuinely pivotal figures? Did he fight for America’s independence, defeat Russia, or rebuild the nation after a civil war?

What is Bill Clinton even remembered for except a sex scandal (and assorted financial ones)?

It is bad enough that partisan historians are obsessed with pushing FDR to the top until he replaces Lincoln and, in the current survey, has already displaced George Washington, but they won’t stop until Bill Clinton’s red face is on Mount Rushmore only because of the D after his name.

And there’s Joe Biden, currently outranking Woodrow Wilson who, for all his flaws, presided over the country during WWI and, apart from a brief period when he was in a coma and his wife made the actual decisions, was conscious and able to communicate throughout his presidency.

It’s not just that leftists are bent on tearing down every historical figure, they’re equally determined to replace them with not only radicals, but corrupt and worthless mediocrities.

If William Henry Harrison, who died 31 days after his inauguration due to a bout of especially vigorous handshaking, is to be ranked down at number 41 on account of being incommunicado for most of it, what does that say about Biden? Biden could have only improved on his time in office if he were wholly unable to communicate, instead of only partially able, thereby preventing him from the folly of overseeing multiple economic, political and foreign policy disasters.

But then we must ask ourselves, what is greatness?

The revisionism started with a New Deal rewrite in which all of history began with FDR. Every Republican after Lincoln and Grant was ridiculed and written out of history with an exception made for Teddy Roosevelt whose splinter campaign was deemed to be progressive. Then when the Eisenhower era arrived, the ‘eggheads’ stewed and then with the arrival of JFK, began rewriting history once again.

After the chaos of the JFK and RFK assassinations, and then the frustrating rise of Nixon, the euphoria of his downfall, and the even more frustrating ascension of Reagan, it took some time to reboot history yet again into the form we are seeing again in the latest version of the Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey. The survey has come a long way since the Schlesinger presidential rankings. and it requires a new definition of greatness.

What makes Bill Clinton, Barack Hussein Obama or Joe Biden great? Nothing outward. A conclave of experts assembled to explain their greatness can only spew gibberish. Both Clinton and Obama briefly touched off a spurt of media erotomania, but the spell quickly passed. And no one even fainted at Biden’s basement campaign rallies or believed that he loved them.

But in the New Deal revisionist history, greatness does not come from presiding over historic events, but in pursuing the leftist program of fundamentally transforming America. So while Biden may not make hearts flutter, like JFK, Obama and Clinton, he’s following the same plan.

Somewhere along the way the definition of greatness changed from making America great to making the Left great. It’s a greatness that is equally accessible to sleazy crooks, anti-colonialist hucksters and a fossilized D.C. hack who barely knows where he is half the time.

Sit down, James Madison (no. 11) and get out of Bill Clinton’s way. Learn your place John Adams (no. 13) and let Biden come on up front. We no longer measure the greatness of presidents by their character and their accomplishments, but by their destructiveness.

The greatest of presidents are now those who have done the most to destroy America.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine. Click here to subscribe to my articles. And click here to support my work with a donation. Thank you for reading.