Senior Fellow Karlyn Bowman

What makes a president great? Or a failure?

These questions were the crux of a novel article Harvard historian Arthur Schlesinger wrote 61 years ago. He had conducted an informal presidential "rating poll" among 55 experts in American history and politics, and the results were published in Life magazine.

He updated the survey in 1962, and his son and namesake Arthur Schlesinger Jr. took up the franchise with a more politicized version that appeared in the New York Times magazine in 1996. In that article, Schlesinger gave President Bill Clinton advice about his standing in the "expert" polls--and how to improve it. Scores of others have entered the presidential rating game as well.

In the 1948 article, Schlesinger wrote that there was a "large measure of agreement" among the scholars he consulted when it came to classifying presidents into the "great" and "near great" categories--as well as the "failures."

There were six great presidents--Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, FDR, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. The verdict about Abraham Lincoln among this group was unanimous. Ulysses S. Grant and Warren Harding, whose administrations were marked by corruption, were judged failures.

Those deemed great in this survey had certain things in common, Schlesinger noted. All were president during a "crucial turning point" in our history. They were all "party men," and they all provoked "strong opposition."

In 1945, a few years before Schlesinger surveyed expert opinion, the Gallup Organization asked a national sample who was the greater president, Lincoln or Washington. Forty-two percent replied Lincoln, 22% Washington and 28% responded they were equally great.

Gallup followed up by asking those who chose each man for their reasons. Roughly equal numbers of people said Lincoln's greatness stemmed from freeing the slaves, from being the people's president and from his rise from humble origins. Washington's greatness came from being the father of our country. In an update of the question, asked in 2005, Lincoln overwhelmingly beat Washington.

Perhaps the first survey to ask for the public's verdict on living presidents came in 1949, when Franklin D. Roosevelt swamped Herbert Hoover and Harry Truman in a Gallup poll. Today, pollsters ask Americans about their opinions of presidents both living and dead, with many of the questions asked around the celebration of Presidents Day.

For more than a decade, for example, Zogby International has been asking people to rank presidents going back to the second Roosevelt. FDR, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan have vied for top honors in the great or near-great categories in recent years, and Richard Nixon has almost always ranked near the bottom.

In an early 2009 poll that asked Americans about the seven presidents since Gerald Ford, 64% of respondents told Gallup interviewers that Reagan would go down in history as an outstanding or above-average president, followed by Clinton, to whom 50% gave that rating.

George H. W. Bush's mediocre rating (28%) bested his son (17%), whose rating looked a lot like Richard Nixon's (15%).

In a February Gallup/USA Today question about five highly regarded presidents, Reagan was chosen as the greatest president by 24% of those polled, followed closely by JFK and Lincoln (22% each), FDR (18%) and Washington (9%). Of the five, Lincoln enjoyed strong bipartisan and generational appeal, while Reagan's edge came from strong support from Republicans.

As for President Obama, there are high expectations for greatness. In January Gallup/USA Today and Associated Press/Gfk polls, around a quarter said they expected Obama to be an outstanding president, and nearly four in 10 expected him to be above average. Around a quarter thought he would be average, and only very small numbers expected him to be below average or poor.

Some caution is in order, though, about public's early judgments and these polls' value. It is telling that, in 1968, 5% said Richard Nixon would be a great president, 48% said he'd be good and 35% believed he'd be fair. Only 7% said he would make a poor one. But now he is at the bottom of most people's lists.

Karlyn Bowman is a senior fellow at AEI.