C-SPAN recently surveyed 58 American historians and asked them to rank the 41 presidents in each of 10 categories of "presidential leadership." As has been widely reported, Bill Clinton, overall, finished right in the middle of the pack at number 21. As has been even more widely reported, Clinton ranked dead last in the "moral authority" category (Monica Lewinsky, you see) and 36th in "relations with Congress" (the Lewinsky-inspired impeachment).
Our president is famously concerned with his place in history, of course, so THE SCRAPBOOK is sure it knows what Clinton did with these numbers the minute they were publicized on February 21: He tried to figure out how he would have done if Monica Lewinsky had been irrelevant to a judgment on his term in office. Most Americans already think Monica Lewinsky is irrelevant to a judgment on Clinton's presidency, after all. The historians are kinda behind the curve.
Here's what the president must have discovered about himself. If you remove Lewinsky from the calculations, and consider the historians' rankings on only the remaining eight categories of performance, Clinton did remarkably well. Where "pursued equal justice for all" is concerned, for example, Clinton ranked fifth -- ahead of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote "all men are created equal," and James Madison, who wrote the Bill of Rights. And if you add that remarkably boneheaded assessment to the historians' similarly boneheaded overpraise of Clinton in most of the other seven remaining categories, you get this: Bill Clinton is the 14th best president we've ever had. Better than James Madison, James Monroe, and both the Adamses -- and almost as good as Ronald Reagan and Andrew Jackson.
Next January we'll get a brand-new president, our 42nd. Now then: Where do we go to vote for a set of new historians?