If you didn’t know this was coming, you were fooling yourself. From the moment he took office, Barack Obama was guaranteed a spot in the history books as one of the greatest presidents of all time. He could have been impeached six weeks into his first term and it wouldn’t have mattered. There was no way America’s liberal academics were going to let the nation’s first black president go down in history as anything less than a shining example of unqualified success.
And it’s already starting. According to a new C-SPAN poll of 91 historians, Obama is already well on his way to the top of the presidential list. He debuted at #12, giving him plenty of room to move on up in the years to come. Our bet is that he will crack the top ten within a decade, and we won’t be surprised if a few crackpot historians start making a case for Obama as the GOAT.
As it stands now, Obama has to slide past the following presidents to get his shot at the top spot:
11 – Woodrow Wilson
10 – Lyndon Johnson
9 – Ronald Reagan
8 – JFK
7 – Thomas Jefferson
6 – Harry Truman
5 – Dwight Eisenhower
4 – Theodore Roosevelt
3 – FDR
2 – George Washington
1 – Abraham Lincoln
We doubt Obama will have much trouble getting to at least the #9 position; in fact, we’re surprised that these historians have the intellectual integrity to put Reagan in the top ten as it is. From there, he’s got some fairly tough competition, especially since JFK and FDR are entrenched liberal icons. It’s hard to imagine any self-respecting historian putting Obama above Jefferson, but who even knows anymore…
Hilariously, there are those who already think that Obama should have been ranked higher. Howard University historian Edna Greene Medford said she expected him to do a little better.
“Although 12th is a respectable overall ranking, one would have thought that former President Obama’s favorable rating when he left office would have translated into a higher ranking in this presidential survey,” she said. “But, of course, historians prefer to view the past from a distance, and only time will reveal his legacy.”
Put another way: Only time will allow historians to replace Obama’s true legacy with a fantasy they can sell to a new generation of Americans who didn’t have to live through this dark period of history.
Oh well, give Lincoln the boot and crown Obama the greatest of all time for all we care. We’re still too excited about him BEING GONE to work up any serious irritation.
