It’s Q&A Day at Electoral-Vote.com and our intrepid heroes are running behind. So they’ve posted all their questions without the answers!

Throughout the day, as they get around to answering them, they’ll update with their answers, but in the meantime they thought folks might enjoy supplying their own answers.

OK, I’ll bite.

At least to the first question:

T.S. in Anaheim, CA, asks: After I heard the news the previous day I wondered to myself, “Was Jimmy Carter the most genuinely good person to ever be president?” And I thought I should e-mail you to ask if you’ve ever considered ranking presidents or even world leaders in this way.

For example, Teddy Roosevelt accomplished good deeds, but he also celebrated war and empire. Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt did good things, but both strongly compromised their values in order to win support for their causes. We won’t even mention Lyndon B. Johnson.

The more I think about Jimmy Carter, the more I am struck by his fundamental goodness and decency, and how he was willing to sacrifice everything in order to remain true to his beliefs. Has there ever been another president close? Could you even rank a second best?

Having recently done a survey of all the presidents, I thought I might be in a position to answer this one. Initially, I was stumped. I agreed that Jimmy Carter was a genuinely decent guy, but what about any of the other inhabitants of the White House?

Well, after mulling it over for a couple minutes I came up with two candidates for second and third place.

Here they are.

Ulysses S. Grant and John Quincy Adams. 

I offer those without further research, but I recall that Grant found the Mexican War to be repugnant and Quincy Adams did a lot of other worthwhile things when he was not president.

By the time I post this perhaps the question has already been answered.

UPDATE: They have answered and here it is:

(V) & (Z) answer: We will start with a few caveats. First, as we’ve indicated with our halfway-done Carter series, he was willing to play politics when he had to. No president is an angel 100% of the time. Second, because values have changed, it can be hard to evaluate presidents of past generations. For example, what we call imperialism was regarded as legitimately charitable deeds by Theodore Roosevelt. Third, most of what we know about presidents is their public persona. They might have been very different people behind the scenes.

With this said, based on available evidence, we think it’s fair to consider Carter to be the most “good” a person to ever have served as president. We would say the pretty clear runner-up is John Quincy Adams. Others in the conversation are Lincoln, William McKinley, Gerald Ford, Barack Obama and Joe Biden.