Ministry of Presidents Certifies Obama Greatest of Last Four; Bush Takes a Shock Silver

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: The Ministry of Presidents has finished its review of the four most recent occupants of the Oval Office. After less than a day of deliberation, which the Ministry counts as a full historical era, the crowd has ruled that Barack Obama is the greatest of the last four U.S. presidents. The surprise is in second place. Silver goes to George W. Bush, a result the Ministry has filed under "Unexpected Developments, Bipartisan".

The Ministry is not the first to try this. Historians, political scientists and pollsters rank presidents all the time, and their rankings of U.S. presidents shift depending on the method and on who is asked. NPR reports that the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project, which surveyed more than a hundred and fifty historians and presidential experts, placed Biden fourteenth and Trump dead last. Even the conservative respondents put Trump in the bottom five. According to the same Wikipedia summary, Obama has often made historians' top ten, while Bush is one of the few recent presidents who usually misses the top twenty. In a 2024 Gallup poll of the public, Obama had the highest average rating of the four and Biden the lowest, with Trump just ahead of Bush.

The crowd agrees with the experts about the gold medal and very little else. On Morfi's opinion markets, where people back their views with real money, Obama leads at 35% consensus. Bush follows at 22%, and 2 other sides sit further down. So far 12 traders have put $29,332 behind their opinions. The historians had Biden well above Bush, and Gallup's respondents had Trump narrowly above him. The market has moved Bush ahead of both, and the Ministry describes this as "a promotion nobody saw coming, least of all the history departments."

The Ministry has a proposal. Rankings clearly settle things, and elections only cause arguments, so the next president should be ranked before taking office. Candidates would serve a symbolic one-day term, the market would score them, and the winner would skip the remaining one thousand four hundred and sixty days and go straight to the presidential library. This would save the nation an estimated four years of debate per cycle. The Ministry also recommends that Bush's silver be studied by a commission, since it appears that the passage of time is the most effective policy any administration has ever had. As we noted when the Ministry of Arithmetic confirmed that two comes before three, the crowd is perfectly comfortable correcting the official record.

Trading opened less than a day ago, so the Ministry reserves the right to revise history before lunch. Watch whether Bush can hold his surprising silver, and whether Biden's backers can bring the historians' ranking into the market. To file your own submission to the official record, join the market on Morfi.