I’ve decided to do a series on the Presidents of the United States.

I’ll be classifying them as good (👍🏾), bad(👎🏾), or indifferent (😕), but I won’t be ranking them into numbered best or worst lists.

The idea for this grew out of a couple lists I made a few years ago of the best and the worst presidents, and I was originally going to dust those off and expand on them.

Then it seemed to make sense to go through the entire kit and caboodle and judge each president on his own merits, or lack thereof.

Now, I’m not a historian and I don’t pretend to use a historian’s criteria.

Instead, I’m going to simply decide if each president left the Republic better off on the day he left office than when he assumed it, based solely on my own particular prejudices of the moment. Don’t expect me to be consistent, because you know what Emerson said about a foolish consistency.

I’m not going to hold a president’s foibles or flaws against him, at least not if they didn’t affect his carrying out the duties of the office, in my opinion. Thus, it doesn’t matter to me whether he owned slaves during his tenure as president (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson). Nor do I care about illegitimate children or sex in a closet of the Oval Office (Grover Cleveland, Warren Harding). Nor will I give a president extra points just because he shares a granfalloon with me (James Buchanan). But SPOILER ALERT: if I were ranking the presidents, Buchanan would be fighting for a place at the very bottom (but you all knew that already, didn’t you?).

I also intend to use the presidential campaigns as part of my criteria, as I firmly believe that a person should be judged by the means by which he attains an electoral office. “There are no ends, only means.” 

For the most part I’ll just be classifying the good and the bad as that, I won’t rank them in order as the top ten or bottom ten or whatever, but in a very few cases I might add a second thumb to indicate especially good or bad. You probably don’t need a spoiler alert to know that if I did do an actual ranking, Washington and Lincoln would each be vying for first place, with Lincoln probably getting the edge. And in a few cases I might have to weigh the harm against the benefits of a given administration. I have no doubt that were I to return to this topic in a year or two (or even a week or two!) I might very well have a slightly different perspective on this or that president, so these are not necessarily my final judgments.

I don’t expect my classifications to be particularly controversial until I get to about 1960 or so, and from then on I’ll probably make some people angry at me on both sides of the political divide.

So on to the first president!