This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, July 12, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Presidents who presided over peace and prosperity seem to fall to the bottom of presidential

rankings, but quietly securing the blessings of liberty is precisely what presidents are supposed

to do.

So says Cato Institute Vice President Gene Healy.

The Siena Research Institute came out with one of these perennial polls ranking the presidents and I guess one of the

only surprising things about this one was that they've decided 18 months into

his term that Barack Obama is already the 15th best president in

US history. But you know maybe that's surprising, given that he got the Nobel Prize when

voting closed about two weeks after his inauguration, and nobody's quite clear on

why that happened. But with the

Cianna poll outside of that one aspect there really weren't any

surprises. It's very typical of the common practice of ranking presidents, which has

almost always served to advance the people who dream big and dare great things to populate the top 10

list with war leaders and activists presidents who offer new deals and new frontiers and great societies.

And to devalue presidents who are content with staying within their constitutional bounds and presiding over peace and prosperity.

Is the assumption that these historians, when they get involved in these rankings,

is the assumption that circumstances are thrust upon these so-called great presidents or that they just have a big idea they just want to get their program through.

Well, it's kind of perverse in a way

because the political scientists and scholars

who participate in these things pretty well admit

that they value crisis presidents,

...