Consider Warren G. Harding, dead last in the Schlesinger polls, next to
last in the WSJ/Federalist poll. Historians have downgraded him for his
scandal-ridden administration. But that can't be the only reason for his
abysmal ranking: Harding wasn't personally corrupt, after all, and he
never profited from his cronies' misdeeds.
Place that fault against his great merits: Harding presided over the
dismantling of Wilson's draconian wartime controls, ushering in an era
of prosperous "normalcy." (Is it the normalcy that presidential scholars
hold against him?) Harding's good nature and liberal instincts led him
to pardon the dissenters that Wilson had locked up, among them Socialist
presidential candidate Eugene Debs, imprisoned for making a speech
against the draft. "I want [Debs] to eat his Christmas dinner with his
wife," Harding said.
Harding's successor, Calvin Coolidge, hasn't fared much better in the
polls: below average in the WSJ/Federalist survey, bottom 10 in the
Schlesinger Jr. survey. Cal kept things entirely too cool for historians
who like presidential drama: he slept too much, didn't do enough, and
didn't talk enough. There was method to his muteness, though. As he put
it, "Nine-tenths of [visitors to the White House] want something they
ought not have. If you keep dead still they will run down in three or
four minutes." After six years of George W. Bush, a president bent on
expanding executive power and redeeming the world through military
force, the modest, unheroic virtues of a Harding and a Coolidge are
easier to appreciate. There ought to be room at the top of the rankings
for presidents who know when to keep quiet and who understand the limits
of power.
http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6859
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