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The presidency has been ranked for eighty years. Schlesinger started it in 1948, Siena has run it seven times, C-SPAN four times, and there are two dozen surveys in between. You can find a president’s standing on ten named characteristics, with the per-category scores, on a live web page. The Speakership has been ranked once. In 1998. By a master’s student. That is the whole of it. Dennis Roy Still, at Iowa State, mailed a questionnaire to sixty congressional scholars and asked them to rate fifty Speakers on four questions. His abstract calls it, accurately, “the first attempt to rank the U.S. House Speakers” (Still, Ranking the American Speakers, Iowa State University Digital Repository). Nobody has repeated it in the twenty-eight years since. Still’s scholars could rate only thirty-eight of his fifty, and the six Speakers who have held the gavel since 1998 were not in his survey at all. Eighteen of the fifty-six people who have been Speaker have never been rated by anyone. ...

I have graded all forty-four presidents, and I want to show the work. What follows is the whole method, written out so that someone else can reproduce it, attack it, and see exactly where my judgment enters. The short version: the letter grades are mine, and the underlying scores are not. Every number below comes from C-SPAN’s 2021 Historians Survey, and the transcription was checked three independent ways before I used any of it. ...