In her iconic song "Big Yellow Taxi," an obvious lament about American presidents who have been underappreciated while in office only to finally be given their due with time's passage, famed presidential historian Joni Mitchell wondered, "Don't it always seem to go that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone?" Professor Mitchell clearly foresaw C-SPAN's Presidential Historians Survey, a periodic survey of historians on presidential leadership asked to rank past presidents on the basis of 10 criteria. The survey illustrates how presidents who leave office with their popularity in tatters are given high marks once the hurly-burly of political combat has receded and facts can be properly assessed. For instance, Harry Truman, whose popularity by 1952 was so low that he opted not to run for reelection rather than be rejected at the polls, was ranked sixth highest among the presidents in the most recent survey.
Lyndon Johnson, so unpopular in his own party in 1968 that he withdrew from the race for the Democratic nomination shortly after being humiliated in the New Hampshire primary, is ranked 11th based on his prodigious record of passing civil rights legislation. In just four weeks, a bruised and depleted Joe Biden, aging before our eyes and a punching bag for pundits on both sides of the aisle, will go home to Delaware. Though he has remained president for constitutional purposes since Nov.
5, his presence, if you can call it that, has been largely unfelt for months. On a.
