Presidential Lists

Someone asked for my list of the five smartest presidents.  In roughly  descending, I'd say

Lyndon Johnson
Abraham Lincoln,
Barack Obama
Thomas Jefferson,
Bill Clinton

I know other people would have another list but that's mine. 

There were other very smart presidents, the stupidest would certainly include in rapidly descending order

Franklin Pierce
Howard Taft
Ronald Reagan
George W. Bush
Donald Trump

The list of stupid presidents is a long one.  The list of American Presidents isn't a list of great men, it's a list more characterized by mediocrity and political manipulation. 

A moral ordering of the presidents would almost certainly be far harder to make though I think there is little question that Jimmy Carter would belong on it.  I'd put him at the top of that list.   He is certainly the most admirable person in their post-presidential life, a far rarer thing.  I think the moral quality of a president, depending on the times of their presidency,  is of greater importance than their brilliance as an intellect.  Bill Clinton was brilliant intellectually, he was hardly a great figure of moral leadership.  Jefferson was a genius in intellect and a slave-owning, slave-raping  president who kept his own children in bondage, thwarted the aspirations of the Haitians in escaping bondage and establishing a republic, and a continent stealing and so Indian murdering moral cesspool.  However, Donald Trump - though he has, as of yet, not gotten us into the kind of foreign war on behalf of billionaires that Bush II did - is certainly one of those sucking at the bottom of that list. 

I wonder what your lists would look like.

Nancy Pelosi is the best Speaker of the House in its history.  Certainly the farthest left, though wise enough to know that striking a political pose is not the same as winning and keeping the house so you can do the possible instead of the merely, never to be had because never in power aspirational stuff.