Up to now, The Scrapbook has looked skeptically at rankings of presidents by historians. They tend to be biased, trendy, superficial, and based on no little myth. The only thing worse than getting historians—liberals, for the most part—to do the ordering would be to ask sociologists. Yet we couldn’t resist C-SPAN’s newest version of its “Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership,” as it marks the first time Barack Obama is included in the rankings.

He arrives as the twelfth-best president, right behind Woodrow Wilson and just ahead of James Monroe. That’s a mite high. But it’s just right so long as you think Obama was a better president than James Polk (14), William McKinley (16), James Madison (17), Andrew Jackson (18), John Adams (19), George H. W. Bush (20), John Quincy Adams (21), Calvin Coolidge (27), and Martin Van Buren (34). After all, historians say so.