THIS AFTERNOON, a ceremony will be held for the 2003 Medal of Freedom recipients in the East Room of the White House. President Bush’s list is uniformly excellent, and incredibly revealing when compared with some of Bill Clinton’s picks for the nation’s highest civilian honor. Clinton’s choices, of course, included several remarkable and deserving man and women. But he placed them on equal footing with other, lesser lights, including Jesse Jackson (2000), Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter (1999), George McGovern (2000), and Marian Wright Edelman (2000), who is currently suing the Bush administration over the No Child Left Behind program.

Clinton’s most controversial pick was J. William Fulbright (1993); his most entertaining was Albert Shanker (1998). Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, may be most famous for his cameo in Woody Allen’s comedy “Sleeper”: Allen’s character, frozen in 1973, wakes up after 100 years and learns that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”