In a new 538 post, the author Nate Silver spends a lot of energy proving the unsurprising: that presidents who serve longer, and win larger re-electoral margins, are better regarded by history—or at least by historians. If this is truth I suppose that the reelection of Barack Obama will confirm it. The President of the U.S. is about one of the most loved Presidents we have had in the last decades and its correlated hate is also one of the highest. In the time previous to his election I read hundreds of comments in my Facebook profile explaining how the “World as we know it was going to end if he got the reelection”. Luckily, the world is still going on and chances are that the ideas of Obama & Co. will continue reigning and being popular.
Contemporary History (specially if read through the American lenses) is quite ridiculous. Their exceptional-ism is impressive and how they read and understand history is also ludicrous.
More interesting is to read the article by Mr. Silver (whom many consider to be THE professional in his field). Feel free to continue reading it and prepare yourself to laugh. The world may not end with Barack Obama… it will just get a little sadder…
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The rankings I will refer to here come from a composite of the four most recent surveys in which presidential scholars were asked to rank the presidents. (The surveys were conducted between 2008 and 2011). I’ve averaged the rankings among the four surveys and then re-ranked the presidents from 1 to 43 accordingly. (Ties are broken by the best median ranking; Cleveland is counted only once for these purposes.)
We might divide the presidents into three basic groups: good (those who rank in the top 15), poor (those in the bottom 15) and average (everyone in between).
Globalization & Capitalism 