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The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game. By Alvin Stephen Felzenbetg. New York: Basic Books, 2008. 442 pp.
Alvin Felzenberg is upset - with some justification - at the liberal bias he sees as so prevalent in the ranking of U.S. presidents by historians and political scientists. To remedy this, he has provided a counter to the liberal bias with a conservative bias. In doing so, he commirs all the sins of which he accuses libetals. This book is a mirror image of the work he finds so troubling.
Felzenberg begins by recounting the many problems with rankings of presidents, from "ideological predilections," to the "failure to set forth precise criteria" for evaluating presidents, to "a tendency of some jurors to reflect the findings of past surveys" (p. ix), and a "failure to distinguish policy 1 torn process" (p. 5). But to the author, it is...