The Leaders We Deserved (And a Few We Didn't): Rethinking the Presidential Rating Game

Rating the presidents remains a perennial pastime of historians, pundits, and presidency buffs. Most surveys place presidents into categories such as "Great," "Near-Great," and "Failure." Their originators seldom, however, inform readers what lay behind those designations. In the Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't ), Alvin S. Felzenberg assigns the presidents separate grades in each of six categories (character, vision, competence, among others). He offers a fresh look at "old favorites" and rescues others from obscurity and ridicule. Most importantly, he supplies evidence in support of his conclusions.

"Felzenberg is to be credited with bringing to the presidential-ratings game a quality that had been sorely lacking: an opportunity to debate....He offers us an opportunity to deliberate, discuss, and ultimately sharpen our views of the presidents."---National Review

"A nuanced look at where the nation's chief executives stood out and where they stumbled."---Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Alvin S. Felzenberg is not just some guy seated at the end of the bar, mouthing off about what he thinks he has learned from the History Channel and C-SPAN3. He has been a state and federal government official (most recently spokesman for the 9/11 Commission), congressional staffer, Republican political activist, biographer, essayist, and commentator, with a doctorate in politics from Princeton. But he is not a historian, and The Leaders We Deserved (and a Few We Didn't) is, in essence, a rebuttal to academic historians who, until now, have dominated the ratings racket, under the direction of the Arthur M. Schlesingers, pere and fils."---Weekly Standard

"This is a fun book that serves up the first systematic and rational approach to evaluating our presidents---past, present and future. It is highly entertaining and almost certain to raise more than a few eyebrows."---Tucson Citizen

Alvin S. Felzenberg teaches at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University, and Johns Hopkins University. He was principal spokesman for the 9/11 Commission. Felzenberg holds a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton and has been a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government.