CHAPTER Eight
The Presidency

Exercises

Ranking the presidents

Americans have different views about what makes a good president. The question, for a student of American politics, is why particular presidents are seen as particularly good. In 2000 the Federalist Society–Wall Street Journal Survey on Presidents ranked past presidents based on the opinions of 78 scholars.

  1. Look at this ranking and consider the following questions:
    • Among the presidents, who were great and who were failures?
    • Is it more difficult to rank recent presidents than presidents of the past? Should we account for the time periods when presidents were in office? For example, would it be useful to divide them into presidents of the traditional presidency and those of the modern presidency? Why might that help these rankings?

  2. One key to understanding the rankings is to examine how the study was done. It included both liberal and conservative scholars who ranked presidents on a scale from 1 to 5, but it also allowed scholars to categorize presidents as "overrated" or "underrated." At the bottom of the ranking page, click on the link to Ranking Methodology to see how the study decided how presidents were "overrated" or "underrated."
    • What weaknesses do the authors admit to in calling someone an overrated or underrated president?
    • What makes Bill Clinton the most "controversial" president? What does that mean for his legacy and the success of his presidency in history's eyes?

  3. The C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership provides rankings of presidents on numerous different categories of presidential leadership. Fifty-eight historians ranked presidents on ten different qualities and released their findings in 2000.
    • Is it better to split up categories of rankings like this C-SPAN study, or to assess presidents generally?
    • How do different presidents rate on these qualities?
    • What does it mean that some presidents, like President Clinton, can rank very high on some qualities (pursuing equal justice, economic management) while ranking rather low on others (relations with Congress, moral authority)?
    • Are some qualities more important than others in a president?
    • Since both the Federalist Society–Wall Street Journal study and the C-SPAN study came out before President George W. Bush's presidency, we have no expert ratings of him here. Evaluate Bush based on the C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership categories. How would you rank him?

  4. Still other presidential rankings are public opinion polls. The 2003 Zogby International Presidential Greatness Poll provides the public's ranking of presidents over the past number of years.
    • How do the results compare to the rankings of scholars provided above?
    • Do you think the assessment of presidents changes more among the public than among scholars? Why?
    • Which is more important: scholarly rankings or public rankings?

A day in the life of the president

  1. Go to The Daily Diary of President Gerald R. Ford, April 28, 1975. You will find President Ford's schedule for one day of his presidency, which provides important insight into the many roles a president plays, as well as the pressures the president faces.
    • What stands out to you about this schedule?
    • With how many people did the president meet in just this one day?
    • How would you rate the difficulty of the president's job, given his schedule?

  2. President Ford met with numerous different people and groups over a wide-ranging set of events and meetings. He swore in an official, met with several officials, and attended public events.
    • Did most of the meetings reflect his role as head of government or head of state?
    • How did Ford manage both roles during just this one day of his presidency?

  3. As the chapter states, President Ford did not originally have a chief of staff but added one as he found out that he needed one. Ford appointed current defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld as his chief of staff, and his deputy chief of staff was current vice president Dick Cheney. Here is a photograph of the three in the Oval Office on April 28, 1975.
    • Looking at President Ford's schedule, how many times did he have meetings with Rumsfeld, Cheney, or both?
    • Given how often the chief of staff and deputy chief of staff are in the president's schedule, how important do you think these positions are in the functioning of the presidency?
    • Would it be at all possible, given what you've seen concerning President Ford's schedule on this single day, for a president not to have a chief of staff?

Executive orders

One of the president's real legislative powers is the ability to release executive orders that carry the weight of law. The chapter illustrates the impact of these executive orders. But how frequently do presidents use executive orders?

  1. The National Archives Federal Register web site provides information on presidential executive orders dating to the Hoover administration. The site lists how many executive orders each president released (for example, President Reagan's executive orders were numbered 12287–12667 between 1981 and 1989, which equals 381 executive orders).
    • Why do you think Franklin Roosevelt released more executive orders than other presidents? Have executive orders gone out of vogue, or were conditions during his presidency unique?
    • One of the interesting things about this site is that it provides the number of executive orders released per year by each president. Click on President Clinton's name to see how many he released per year in office. Clinton released the most executive orders in his first year in office, but he also released twelve in the last twenty days of his term (in 2001). How does this fit with what the text says about the patterns of releasing executive orders?

  2. For President George W. Bush and President Bill Clinton, specific information is available about each executive order they released. Click on each of these presidents' names and choose a few years. Peruse through some of the executive orders.
    • Some of them seem rather trivial, but others cover important topics concerning national defense and the like. Click on some and read the text. What do these orders do?
    • For President Bush, click on the executive orders released shortly after September 11, 2001.